Narratives of Success, Narratives of Failure: The Creation and Collapse of Sistren's "Aesthetic Space"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay looks at the way Jamaican Sistren Theatre Collective's work and public image were shaped during the 1970s and 1980s to meet the needs of political and development agency agendas. During the Democratic Socialist Manley government's eight years in office (1972–80), community groups such as Sistren were encouraged by the government to establish "aesthetic spaces," to quote Augusto Boal, in which the oppression experienced by disadvantaged Jamaicans could be discussed and theatricalized. With the change of government in 1980, support for community-development projects waned and pressure was placed on Sistren to find external avenues of funding, invariably from development agencies. Under the weight of development-agency demands, among them the establishing of a business enterprise to achieve "self-sufficiency," Sistren's "aesthetic space" collapsed. Sistren Theatre Collective, then, can be read as both a narrative of success and one of failure.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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 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".