Disempathy and emotional witnessing in passport photography
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
Passport photography bans the display of emotion and aims at suppressing what speaks to our individual circumstances. This paper argues that the disempathy that results provides a starting point for moral imagination and a method for preserving political engagement beyond the reach of the state. The sharing of emotion concerns political theorists, however, who worry that judgment can be swamped by sentiment, making empathy an unruly or unreliable political resource. Passports represent an aspiration to regulate complex emotions by making identity and belonging a matter of state prerogative rather than interpersonal exchange. The rise of biometrics provides an opportunity to bring emotion under state supervision, dictating its display in a manner that echoes forms of social and racial performance. Efforts to pacify citizens may boomerang, nonetheless, by setting the conditions for unconventional forms of looking and recognition, methods available to individuals but not the states that govern them.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it