Foreign in a domestic sense: Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and paradoxes in critical urban studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2017 Puerto Rican debt crisis is as instructive as it is sad, reflective of the familiar pressures of late modern capitalism (namely neoliberalisation, financialisation, crisis, and austerity) as well as its own unique dynamics percolating through four hundred years of colonialism and a century of legal subjugation to Washington, DC. Neither one-off explanations of fiscal crisis nor casual conflation with other cases suffice to adequately account for this, or any other, public sector debt crises. Puerto Rico is both foreign and domestic, it is neither state nor municipality but its bonds are treated as such, it reflects larger trends and is circumscribed by its own unique history, subtle economic explanations are matched by bald, large-P politics. Analytical conundrums such as these are confounding and lead to perennial, potentially circular and irresolvable, debate in the critical urban studies literature. This paper explores whether the possibility of using the philosophical notion of paradox – a situation where sound reasoning leads to incomplete, unsatisfying, or unexpected results or consequences – and Zeno’s famous paradoxes in particular, can serve as allegorical heuristics capable of provoking new theories, expectations, or assumptions in urban studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".