Martyrdom, collective memory, and the contested penal authority of racial state institutions
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
Recent work in postcolonial and border criminologies has called for more extensive consideration of the complex temporal and geographic dimensions of penal authority. This article explicates new dimensions of the modern state’s penal authority by analyzing the execution and remembrance of Mewa Singh, a Sikh anticolonial activist convicted of killing Canadian immigration agent William C Hopkinson in Vancouver in 1914. Because Hopkinson was embedded in racial immigration enforcement against Indian populations as well as intelligence gathering about anticolonial activities, his death galvanized fields of penal authority that spanned the imperatives of the Canadian nation-state and the British Empire. Using archival and observational data, this article tracks how the significance of Mewa’s execution has been articulated through these penal fields as well as through recent practices of memorialization undertaken by local Sikh and Indian communities. Insofar as these mnemonic practices frame Mewa’s death as a sacrifice necessitated by state racism, my analysis illuminates the complex temporal parameters of penal fields of authority as well as the manner in which they are conditioned by racial borders and boundaries.
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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