7. Producing the Figure of the “Super-Refugee” through Discourses of Success, Exceptionalism, Ableism, and Inspiration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the wake of US President Donald Trump's anti-migrant campaign election platform and his subsequent 2017 executive order, which restricted entry of immigrants and refugees from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, 1 it was publicized that Steve Jobs, the famous CEO and founder of Apple (one of the world's largest and richest multinational technology companies), was the son of a Syrian migrant. 2 The narrative about Jobs's origins was circulated by those who were opposed to Trump's exclusionary policies to contest the expressions of fear, panic, anxiety, and insecurity about the arrival of refugees. 3By pointing to Jobs's tremendous success, those who circulated his origin story meant it as a reminder and illustration of the potential contributions that refugees and migrants can make.Organizations and individuals who advocate for refugees are also increasingly putting forward similar narratives.In fact, a Google search of the term "inspirational refugees" turns up tens of thousands of hits in which UNHCR refugees are hailed for being resilient, determined, and/or successful.A speaker series initiative in Canada called "REF Talks" is but one example.Its stated goal is to "connect the Canadian public with personal stories of refugees and celebrate their success, their contributions and accomplishments in their host country." 4 This chapter questions the inadvertent effects of the inspirational refugee narrative.While recognizing the good intentions behind its circulation, I ask: what is activated through such discourses of inspiration and success?To answer this question, I develop an intersectional analytic framework that brings together key tenets from Critical Refugee Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Critical Disability Studies.Borrowing mainly from Critical Disability Scholars who have worked with the notion of the inspirational "supercrip" -a term used to describe how individuals with disabilities are required to display perseverance, 7 Producing the Figure of the "Super-Refugee" through Discourses of Success, Exceptionalism, Ableism, and Inspiration gada mahrouse
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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 | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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".