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 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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".