Civic‐Led Banishment in South Africa: Punishment, Authority, and Spatialised Precarity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Civic‐led banishment, a fundamentally spatial punishment, is an understudied phenomenon in South Africa and beyond. We define it as “a punitive spatial practice, enacted by non‐state actors in response to alleged criminality or deviance, which attempts varying degrees of socio‐spatial expulsion over time”. This definition lays the framework for a socio‐spatial analysis of punishment, and yields insights into the exercise of socio‐spatial control in public and private space. We emphasise the specific challenges associated with banishment, together with the relationship between space, punishment, public authority, and sovereignty. We demonstrate how “negotiations” around banishment trade off two forms of intersecting precarity: those faced by residents in informal settlements and the potential precarity of public authorities. Finally, we argue that an exploration of all forms of punishment through the lens of socio‐spatial expulsion enables us to tap into conversations around penal abolitionism.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".