Spectacular Technology, Invisible Harms: Witnessing Techno-science on Waste Tours in China
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
Investment in science, technologies, and infrastructures has been a critical aspect of China’s development strategy since the early 2000s. China’s national policies designated waste-to-energy (WtE) incinerators as the dominant end-of-life technology to bring about a form of modern and sustainable waste treatment that can turn waste into energy while eliminating pollution. Amid rising citizen skepticism over the safety and efficacy of this technology in China and elsewhere, this article examines the genre of the orchestrated waste tour, which seeks to place the public as witnesses to state performances of technological improvement. Tours to waste facilities illuminate the generic conventions and strategies that China’s late-socialist mode of green techno-scientific governance relied on to legitimize its achievement of environmental improvement. Tours did not produce passive observers. Through an in-depth discussion of a waste tour in Guangzhou, this paper documents that opportunities for firsthand encounters of WtE incinerators provided a forum for those suspicious of the state’s claims of techno-science to form counternarratives.
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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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