Getting the Lead Out: Urban Chicken Keeping as Transformative Neo-Agrarianism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This ethnographic study explores how the discovery of lead contamination in urban chicken flocks in the Boston area unsettles postindustrial optimism and neo-agrarian romanticism, producing new openings for multispecies relationships. Within rising popular and political attention to food systems, urban chicken keeping stands as a uniquely positioned subset of urban agriculture. Through ethnography with chicken keepers, policy makers and businesses in Boston and Somerville, Massachusetts in the summer of 2016, my research investigated how urban chicken keeping might transform keepers’ thinking about food systems and animal relationships. The unexpected discovery of lead in chickens’ blood and eggs revealed keepers’ increasingly entangled relationships with the history of the soil they and their birds live upon, exposing what Marx (1981) termed the “metabolic rift” at the heart of industrial capitalist approaches to subsistence. With lead breaking the imagined simplicity of urban agriculture and the linear progression of modern cities, responses in urban chicken keeping reveal space for new ways of thinking about collective metabolism, multispecies living, food politics, and the bodies wrapped up in these material legacies.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".