Kapka Kassabova and Ben Judah: Writing Borders and Borderscapes in Contemporary Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses the role of border and borderscapes in two contemporary texts by writers based in Britain, Kapka Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe [Kassabova, Kapka. 2017. Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe. London: Granta] and Ben Judah’s This Is London: Life and Death in the World City [Judah, Ben. 2016. This is London: Life and Death in the World City. London: Picador]. Reading these texts as narratives of border in the context of contemporary discourses on Europe and Brexit, the article shows how the texts challenge the general bordering tendency to represent Europe and Europeans as Britain’s Others, marked by difference and ethnic, cultural, and geopolitical borders. Examining the works in the context of the borderscape concept, the article shows how the texts’ border-crossings challenge such binary thinking and offer ways to locate alternatives to simplistic versions of national identity. The article shows a transforming discourse of borders that underlines their porosity and points to the emergence of new identities as the result of border-crossings. The borderscapes examined in the article (Bulgaria’s southern border and London) reveal diverse belongings and becomings in historical and contemporary contexts that generate new identities.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 | 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".