Now You See Us: The Politics of Visibility in Mumbai’s “Slum” Activism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My research contributes to the fields of Politics of Visibility and visual culture, as well as material politics or the ‘politics of things’ and infrastructure. I build on the suggestion that visibility is a category of inquiry for the social sciences, not to be simply conflated with either social recognition or control and discipline. From this premise, I examine the various registers of visibility, and how they intersect with the politics of physical objects and infrastructures in the lived experiences of informal settlement activists in Mumbai. I use the language of assemblages to describe the web of human and nonhuman actors involved in activist organizing. My three core arguments emphasize the centrality of a Politics of Visibility in the activism context in Mumbai. Activists’ main role is to direct visibility; this is the common thread connecting activists’ activities. Activism is not a calculated attempt to gain resource access. It is a chance to be seen differently. Activist belonging is attached to performative demands which open activist leadership to the criticism that the performance in fact might hinder the stated intentions of the movement; if the need to be seen as a ‘good activist’ were set aside, could new spaces open for actually accessing scarce resources? This examination centres on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over approximately 18 months in Mumbai, including interviews and conversations with government, non-governmental, and private sector actors, as well as many activists living inside and outside of informal settlements. I worked with the activist organization Slum Community Action Foundation (SCAF) headed by Vithal Chavan and the much larger, well-established social movement Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan (GBGBA) under the leadership of Medha Patkar.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".