Encounters of Despair: Street-Level Bureaucrat and Migrant Interactions in Sweden and Switzerland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Encounters between street-level bureaucrats and the so-called “client of the state” – here the migrant individual with precarious legal status – are characterized by great power imbalances. The dependency relationships that emerge out of public administrative encounters need to be understood as spaces of continuous asymmetrical negotiations. Emotions play a crucial role, not only as a translation of how migrants and bureaucrats mutually shape, contest, and reproduce migration control, but also as a strategic component and a tool for negotiation. Supported by ethnographic data from a Swiss Cantonal Migration Office and a Swedish Border Police Unit, collected between 2016 and 2017, I argue that emotions interweave all migrant-bureaucrat interactions. Their analysis discloses not only the emotional labour of migration enforcement, but also how it is translated into bureaucratically enacted practices, which include physical force, vocal exchanges, documents and spatial means, leading to what Walters (2006) coined “political economies of violence” (438).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".