Climate Refugees or Future Migrant Labour Force: A Decolonial Critique of Matthieu Rytz’s Anote’s Ark (2018) and Climate Displacement Discourse in the Pacific
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 2010 to 2020, the global media generally had a very positive view of the voluntary migration schemes or humanitarian refugee visas promised by their Pacific allies (e.g., Australia and New Zealand). However, the actual implementation of climate migrants’ relocation tells a different story, particularly in the case of I-Kiribati people. This paper examines Australian and New Zealand’s governmental policies of immigration for the Pacific islanders over the last two decades. Drawing on a decolonial theoretical approach inspired by Jonathan Pugh, David Chandler and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, in conjunction with Prem Kumar Rajaram’s post-Marxist migrant economy theory, this paper argues that the Australian and New Zealand governments ultimately only paid lip service to humanitarian aid for climate displaced people. In fact, the proposed schemes for I-Kiribati people or other Pacific climate migrants ultimately serve to convert the migrant populations into the host country’s labour force, of use for its neoliberal economy. The second half of the paper turns to an analysis of an award-winning climate documentary produced by a Canadian film maker, Matthieu Rytz. Rytz’s Anote’s Ark (2018) aligns with the “migrating with dignity” policy proposed by the former I-Kiribati president, Anote Tong. Bringing in Malcom Ferdinand’s decolonial analysis of the figure of Noah’s ark in the climate discourse, the paper problematises the general political consensus advanced by this particular type of contemporary climate documentary and challenges the feasibility of the “migrating with dignity” approach. Most importantly, it questions whether climate migrants can truly build a future with dignity in their host country if they are conditioned to supply the migrant labour market.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| 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".