Learning out of place: white affect in academia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the racism and whiteness we felt attending a graduate course in the Fall of 2019. We revisit two moments of the course to highlight how academia is imbued with whiteness at a spatial and affectual level, exemplifying what we call “white affect.” The first moment constitutes the official start of the course, the first day of class, whereas the second moment constitutes its unofficial end; a post-course Zoom meeting that occurred in the Summer of 2020. In each moment, we analyze how our white peers animated white affect through rhetorical devices that served to universalize their feelings and displace ours. Our personal accounts act as entry points into a larger conversation of how academia adopts the same racist-affectual-spatial relations that define western humanism, and how this adoption negatively impacts non-white students. We conclude by arguing that more of us should consider becoming, what Yao calls, “disaffected” within academia.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".