Desire, Interspecies Love, and Becoming-Animal: Reading “The Overstory” in Social Studies Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article springs from our readings and re-readings of The Overstory (Powers, 2018), a text that moved us and changed us. In this article, we conceive of The Overstory as an affective aesthetic text, agentic in its capacity to jolt readers awake and precipitate ontoepistemological swerves in new and unexpected directions. We build from visions of textual engagements that bring a reader to life, disclosing new pathways and possibilities for how to be, feel, and know one another in the world, a world replete with ethical responsibilities, matterings, and entanglements that stretch far beyond the human. Disassembling The Overstory, we string together particular threads with theory and our own engagements with the novel, offering speculative curriculum/classroom futures—visions of what agentic texts like The Overstory can quite literally do (open up, bind together, create, shape, and so on) in social studies education.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".