Rethinking the Refugee Experience in Verbatim Theatre: Hospitality and Translation in Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s <i>Aftermath</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Focusing on Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s 2010 play Aftermath to conceptualize verbatim theatre more broadly, this essay explores problems of mediation among refugees, which mostly stem from their linguistic exchanges. While scholarship on verbatim theatre about refugees has tended to analyze encounters between refugees and dramatists (and through the dramatists, audiences), I demonstrate that power relations inherent in the language of hospitality can also be observed between refugees belonging to the same nation. I turn to Derrida’s philosophy of hospitality and gift-giving to provide a theoretical framework for my inquiry. Especially when some refugees operate as mediators or translators who collaborate with dramatists, the reactions and opinions of other refugees can disclose the frictions among them and can foreground historical and cultural specificity within broader concerns about intercultural understanding. By challenging homogeneous depictions of refugees, this account offers an alternative to binary approaches to verbatim theatre.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".