Activists, care work, and the ‘cry of the ghetto’ in Nairobi, Kenya
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Community activists living and organizing in Nairobi’s harshest geographies are tasked not only with intervening for ‘justice’ but also with (re)establishing care and emotion in landscapes devastated by both colonial and neoliberal divestments and violence. When they act to demand and bridge actions to ensure, for example, water, sanitation and an end to extrajudicial killings, they take on multiple material and affective roles in these neighborhoods. This article argues that as they seek to comfort families, protest the county administration and report violations, amongst other daily interventions, they target not just the reinstatement of basic rights, but also the reinsertion of care and emotion in environments where a normalized (and militarized) precarity has denied the legitimacy of these sentiments. The goal here is not only to ask ‘whatever happened to empathy?’, but, above all, to attend to how it is actively discouraged in particular situations and sites, and how activists are then tasked with incorporating intentional emotional and care labors in their everyday material and discursive practices in order to restore empathy in and for their neighborhoods. This article is informed by over a decade of fieldwork in Mathare ‘slum,’ as well as interviews and participant observation with activists from a cross section of poor urban settlements in the city of Nairobi.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 it