I Am Nobody Here: Institutional Humanism and the Discourse of Disposability in the Lives of Criminalized Refugee Youth in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article uses the concept of “institutional humanism” to explicate how the ideology of humanism is deployed through a biopolitical “discourse of disposability” to dehumanize, objectify, and animalize racialized and criminalized refugee youth in Canada, setting them in opposition to mainstream Whites who are deemed normal, rational, and autonomous—in essence, human. This article identifies four mechanisms of disposability: the expulsion of criminalized refugee youth from school and the labor market, the “revolving door” of the criminal justice system, the creation of deportability, and disinvestment in programs for youth. The treatment of criminalized refugee youth as disposable is part of an epistemological and ontological exercise that creates and enforces a boundary between those defined as human and those who are excluded from the set of “bodies that matter.” The study was conducted through qualitative interviews with criminalized refugee youth and professional adults who work with them. The interview data are set within the web of theoretical relationships among humanism, posthumanism, animalization, institutional policy, and categorizations based on race, gender, class, ability, age, and immigration status, demonstrating how these theoretical nodes attain bolder relief when operationalized under performativity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".