Emotionally Uninhabitable? Dramatizing Environmental Destruction and Contamination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores patterns of emotional expression in drama about the human capacity to damage the natural environment and cause extinctions. I propose that drama offsets depictions of a physically uninhabitable environment with contrasting emotions so it does not become emotionally uninhabitable, and I discuss this proposition in relation to twentieth-century canonical drama and two plays about atmospheric and land damage. Dymphna Cusack’s Pacific Paradise from 1955 and Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children from 2016 frame catastrophic events through the responses of women scientists and oscillating patterns of fearful and cheerful emotions and moods. Drama about land contamination from nuclear radiation and its devasting impact on First Nations peoples is a relevant forerunner to drama about global warming – an ironic development, since some twenty-first-century climate change strategies have accepted nuclear power as an option. Scenarios of an uninhabitable environment might be a longstanding part of political performance, but in these plays, a fear-inducing mood that begins to seem overpowering is often interrupted with humour and by characters taking resistant action.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".