Seascape shadows: Life in the ruins of the edible bird's nest harvest in northern Palawan, the Philippines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The intensifying extraction, privatization, and conservation of maritime spaces are transforming seascapes globally. Amidst rapid coastal change and the ambiguous reconfiguration of oceans as frontiers are coastal dwellers who occupy the shadows of these seascapes. In contrast to the capture of high-profile marine species, the harvest of the edible nests of balinsasayaw (swiftlet, Aerodramus fuciphagus) remains largely concealed at the interstitial spaces between land, coast, and sea. In the Philippines, harvesters known as busyador negotiate social relations, political networks, and karst systems to extract these lucrative nests. Despite the nest industry growing in value in Southeast Asia, we show how the busyador struggle in precarious social relations and spaces peripheral to coastal governance in northern Palawan Island. Building on the concept of ‘seascape assemblages’, we emphasize the importance of the less visible human-nonhuman relations that shape the nest harvest and trade. We trace the marginal social histories of the balinsasayaw by highlighting the precarious nature of the harvest, revealing how the busyador are subject to unfair working conditions, dispossession, and violence. We argue that as state actors and local elites reconfigure oceans as frontiers for development and conservation, struggles over labour and tenure rights, livelihood opportunities, and justice at sea are disregarded.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".