The Conditions of the Working Class in 1960s Beirut: Fire and Everyday Struggles in Karantina
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this paper, I examine the spatial processes of class formation within informal urban spaces. To do so, I consider Karantina in the 1960s, an outgrowth of one of the oldest refugee camps in the world situated in northeastern Beirut, Lebanon. I focus on the struggles of those living in precarious informal shacks, known as tanaké, who repeatedly fought against arson likely instigated by local landowners seeking to evict them. This analysis underscores the decisive role material conditions play in fostering class consciousness among a diverse population, primarily composed of factory and informal workers, as they assert their “right to the city”. I argue that these galvanising confrontations, experienced as recurrent displacement by fire, catalysed a political struggle that transformed this group from a class‐in‐itself into a class‐for‐itself. A socio‐spatial analysis of the material living conditions of the working class, defined by everyday struggles, is essential to understanding political subjectivity.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".