Empowered, almost: luxury consumption and the crooked urban life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“What’s hair got do with it?” is the question at the heart of this paper that is based on fieldwork in Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria (June 2022–September 2022; April–June 2023). These two cities are undergoing urban change, particularly in terms of renewal, beautification, and more regional and foreign investments. I engage with ethnographic fiction and ethnographic reflection to explore youth's desire to consume luxury as a pathway to empowerment via upward social mobility so that they can partake in the “good” parts of urban change while trying to circumvent increasing uncertainty and high levels of unemployment in the city. Through this engagement, I consider how beauty is deeply spatial by highlighting the relationship between hair, aspirational identity, imagined future selves and youth (im)mobility in two short stories, Miracle and Lagos Big Babe. Informed by Faria and Fluri’s (2022, Allure and the spatialities of nationalism, war and development: Towards a geography of beauty. Geography Compass, 16(9), e12652. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12652) work on the geography of beauty, I emphasize that beauty has a material and affective quality that is corporeal and grounded in place. I tie the two stories together in my reflection on the role hair can play in building social capital and increasing social mobility while arguing that these aspirational identities are being fashioned in structurally skewed discursive neoliberal urban spaces.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".