Circus, In Crisis: Examining Care and Community in Circus Training
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 paper is about care through kindness in recreational circus practice. I offer care as a category of relational kindness, where the connectivity of intimacy and trust construct modes of “being held” that do not – particularly in times of the Covid-19 pandemic – necessitate physical presence, but instead emotional support, healing, and accountability. Kindness and care are in this conceptualization how we relate to and treat ourselves, as well as our environment, and others. When in a crisis that distinctly necessitates isolation and distance our modes of care necessarily shift with our relationship to space and surroundings, requiring new forms of virtual spotting that are as much about safety practices for our physical bodies, as they are about strategies for supporting our mental health. Refusing a simplistic or romanticized attribution to care in crisis, this article moves to critique how care and kindness can be taken up and appropriated towards neoliberal aims that mask, rather than address systemic inequities. Through personal reflections on circus practices during the pandemic, alongside performance analyses and critical considerations of norms in the circus industry, I explore care and kindness as it mutates and adapts through our relationships with others, ourselves and the spaces we traverse.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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