Changing the Narrative of Displacement in Africa: Counter-Narratives, Agency, and Dignity
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
This essay draws on the author’s experiences of teaching Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to Write about Africa” and select chapters from Ben Rawlence’s City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp in various undergraduate courses at University of Toronto Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. It makes the case for how these works enable instructors to disrupt the normative narrative of displacement based on the victim-perpetrator binary in mainstream media and humanitarian discourses and center the multidimensionality of displaced peoples across different eras and geographical locations. The essay discusses how each work offers students with strong counter-narratives to the dominant depoliticized and depersonalized accounts of dislocation in Africa by considering historical and contemporary context and foregrounding (displaced) Africans as humans that have agency and dignity. Additionally, the essay demonstrates how each work galvanizes students to identify and deconstruct their implicit biases, particularly when it comes to how they may have (unknowingly) contributed to the continuing portrayal of displaced Africans in victimizing ways. Through student discussion and coursework, the essay demonstrates how each work can empower students, who have themselves or have family members who previously experienced dislocation, to share their experiences and use them to build their own counter-narratives, in the process constructing an enriched archive of displacement that goes beyond the frameworks offered in course materials and that can be used to understand processes of displacement beyond the particular contexts discussed in the classroom.
 Keywords: African experiences, Agency, Displacement, Refugees, Dadaab,
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 | 0.001 | 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 it