Twists and Turns: Splits, Snowballs and Tweaks in Cultural Theory
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
When colleagues of mine first learned of the conference "Re: Turns," on which this issue of eTopia is based, their almost unanimous response was to note how exciting and brilliant they found the theme. Some commented that they always felt called upon to write within a particular theoretical turn, rather than about it, and that the invitation to reflect on turns from a positon of temporary exteriority felt liberating. On the other hand, the challenge of writing about theoretical turns, I want to suggest, is that it requires that we disengage ourselves from some of the more pious ideas we might have about intellectual work. To think about turns is to admit that the agendas guiding our work do not simply arise through the appearance of political or cultural questions in the world. It is to acknowledge that, while the world poses questions to us all the time, these questions are given form within worlds of scholarship, which, at some very basic level, are like stock markets of rising and failing theoretical fashions Turns are political in their own distinctive ways, but their political dimensions reside in the ways in which they organize intellectual work as a communal activity. This is distinct from seeing turns as one of the channels through which the world communicates, to us, its questions and urgencies. An attentiveness to turns may reveal something else, as well: that the state of theoretical thinking in a given moment is not usually the direct result of collective deliberation, as if everyone in a discipline or subfield were forever examining theoretical alternatives in order to agree upon those which seem most effective. Rather, we might usefully think of changes of theoretical perspective in the energetic terms of the cycle, as arcs of
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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