Building the Nation or Building the Self? The Motivations Driving Young Ethiopian Diaspora Engagement in Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early theorizations of were preoccupied with homeland building initiatives, as this literature was highly influenced by the paradigmatic Jewish case. While the literature has broadened since then, contemporary interest in engaging in has revived the classical focus. Current conceptualizations of diasporas, particularly African diasporas, often privilege diaspora-state relations and the experiences of people who emigrated from their homeland in their adulthood. Thus, the motivations driving diaspora engagement in are often taken for granted as inherent, and conceived of as a natural consequence of peoples' direct interpersonal and political ties to their homeland. This paper is informed by fieldwork conducted with young diasporans of Ethiopian origin (YDEOs)* who have engaged in various Ethiopian initiatives. While many YDEOs described their motivations as part of a desire to connect with and help develop Ethiopia as a country, their engagement often served as a mechanism with which to realize personal and professional ambitions, and wrestle with broader questions about their values and place in the world. Examining the engagements of migrant descendants, such as YDEOs, helps to challenge the conception of diasporas as primordial and bounded communities, and development as a benign process of modernization engaged in by for natural and altruistic reasons. (*FOOTNOTE: My respondents were born and or raised most of their lives in North America. Given the nascent nature of Ethiopian migration to the West, most of the YDEOs were also under the age of 35. The interviews were conducted in Toronto, New York, Washington, DC, and Addis Ababa.)
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".