Human Folly and Border Fences: Looking to Non-Human Actors at the Indo–Bangladesh Border
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
The obsession with inter-state territorial borders and the associated paraphernalia of border management and security makes borders and their management a primarily human-centric discourse. This paper makes an attempt at introducing the agency of rivers as non-human actors—or rather as actants—in shaping and managing international borders. The paper looks specifically at the riverine sector of the Indo-Bangladesh border, where the international boundary has been re-negotiated each year by the transnational rivers, primarily the Brahmaputra (also the Gangadhar), through flooding, erosion, and deposition of sediment. By interrogating the role of rivers in shaping the border and border management strategies, the paper argues that humans, despite persisting as the primary agents in border management, are not the only actors. Drawing on Actor Network Theory (ANT), a case is made to appreciate the general symmetry between humans and non-humans as a-priori equal. Incorporating both in an actor-network may provide insights into border management in complex borderlands.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.003 | 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