Theorizing ‘Surplus Populations’ in Racial Capitalism through Juvenile Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of ‘surplus population’ explains how child welfare functions in the context of racial capitalism to cultivate and develop the productive capacities of children to ensure the development of a productive adult. Productive here simply means activity that adds value to privately owned capital. It does not mean: active, alive, creative, generative, dynamic, social, etc. Surplus population is that part of the population that is permanently surplus to the needs of capital and outside of the logic of productivity for capital. It does not, of course, mean that people are surplus for one another or that they are outside of community and family or that their lives are intrinsically useless or lack value. Surplus population is a concept specifically tied to how capitalism values life. This chapter argues that when the imagined future of the child falls outside of the scope of a productive future and locates the child now and in the future as part of a surplus population, juvenile justice and other mechanisms of abandoning and containing children and exposing them to premature death are mobilized. Book synopsis: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies showcases the cutting-edge theoretical work that has been produced within the field of childhood studies. It speaks to both scholars and students in the field by addressing basic questions such as what childhood is, how childhoods are diversely constructed and how children's experiences can be better understood. The volume draws together a wide range of theoretical perspectives from the social sciences, humanities, politics, postcolonialism, feminism, critical race studies, queer theory, disabilities studies to generate a much-needed conversation about how to move childhood studies forward as a grounded field of research. The volume is subdivided into three broad sections - subjectivities, relationalities, and structures - each of which contains around ten chapters from a diversity of disciplines and author identities. The chapters are written by experts from Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, India, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".