Making Precarious: The Construction of Precarity in Refugee and Migrant Discourse
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
In popular media, and sometimes even in academia, people in movement across borders are described as “precarious”; their lives are precarious, their journeys are precarious, their existence is one of precarity. Yet, precarity is not—and never has been—an emergent property of people or their actions. Precarity is a function of the state. It is the state which defines precarity through policy, action (and inaction), and which inscribes that precarity onto those bodies it wishes to regulate. By attaching the label of precarity to migrants and refugees, rather than by describing the actions of states as “making precarious,” discourse obfuscates the disciplinary and normative powers of the state, both at its borders and throughout its area of control. By examining the experiences of non-binary, queer, and trans migrants at Canadian points of entry, and through a critical examination of the literature surrounding the concept of precarity, this paper argues that state interactions with vulnerable people in motion across borders constitute a claims-making process by which bodies are a) made precarious, and b) made into objects for moral regulation and discipline. Bodies in motion across borders are an empirical reality, but their precarity is constructed, reified by the state, and their existence subject to a normative discourse which paints them as threats to be regulated or repelled, or objects of humanitarian concern.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it