Creativity, Sociability, Solidarity: New-Wave Carnival Krewes’ Responses to COVID-19 in New Orleans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
New Orleans was one of the first cities in the USA to be severely affected by the COVID‑19 pandemic. This article draws on long-term ethnography and recent remote fieldwork to explore how new-wave carnival krewes in New Orleans responded to the pandemic. New-wave krewes are one of the kinds of social clubs that produce carnival each year. During the first four months of the pandemic, some of them undertook various kinds of projects within their membership and in the broader community. I propose that these projects have three overlapping dimensions: creativity, sociability, and solidarity. My argument is that because they are so enmeshed in the social fabric of New Orleans, new-wave carnival krewes provided a solid foundation for social initiatives that sought to alleviate the existential and material insecurity of the pandemic. I further argue that carnival has emerged as an important way for New Orleanians to make the imaginative connection between the personal and the social that is necessary for grasping the scope of COVID‑19. More broadly, I contribute to what Joel Robbins has called an “anthropology of the good” in social relations.
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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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.017 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".