Visualizing the Voiceless and Seeing the Unspeakable: Understanding International Wordless Picturebooks about Refugees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the formal and ethical implications of the wordless picturebook about refugees, a recent and international phenomenon. Picturebooks in this small and expanding sub-genre, we argue, are part of the “children’s literature of atrocity” (Baer 382) and use the quintessential features of the wordless form to empower or disempower, humanize or otherize, their child refugee subjects. Some of the examples we engage with problematically rely upon a clumsy refugee/non-refugee binary between safe white child and seemingly perpetually unsafe black “other,” whereas the remaining examples use the wordless form to create more collaborative, dialogical, and less binarized depictions of the relationship between the shores of Europe and the conceptualized Global South. To represent this “unspeakable” reality through wordless picturebooks emphasizes their potency at enabling readers to take risks in their navigation of meaning, transforming non-verbal affective response into speaking the unspeakable aloud
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".