More Than Material: The Vibrancy of the Car in the Volkswagen Diesel Scandal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis pits the work of political theorist Jane Bennett, namely the theoretical paradigm of vibrant materialism, against conventional political economic approaches to material culture, and the wider political economy of automobile society.It asks, and answers, two overarching questions: what can Bennett's vibrant materialism contribute to more traditional Marxist style materialism, and what benefit can they, together, bring to discussions about material culture in anthropology?Secondly, how were the events of the Volkswagen diesel scandal of 2015, i.e. the unbridled success of clean diesel technology in the U.S., the duplicitous role of Volkswagen's 'defeat devices', and the entire network of characters involved, affected by the material composition of diesel cars and the wider political economy of automobility?I argue that Volkswagen's clean diesel cars are vibrant materials, which actively produce the subjectivities that are contrary to the ecological-sensitivity the technology is purported to advance.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".