Towards Global Displacement Studies?: A Response to Owen’s ‘From Forced Migration to Displacement?’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This response advocates for the conceptual utility of displacement and the potential emergence of Global Displacement Studies (GDS). I argue that displacement provides a more expansive analytical framework than migration studies, refugee studies, or forced migration studies, capturing the broader structural forces—economic, political, historical—forces that drive human movement and vulnerability. In so doing, I emphasise how displacement is deeply embedded in contemporary capitalism and social difference—race, gender, class, and sexuality. This response explores three key potentialities of GDS: (1) Its capacity to address systemic displacement in the context of capitalist inequality; (2) its ability to reframe place, scale, and temporality in global political economy; and (3) its potential to disrupt state-led categorisations of migration and forced movement. Rather than replacing forced migration or refugee studies, the analytic of global displacement offers a broader intellectual terrain for scholars examining displacement beyond migration categories, thereby embracing analysis of colonial dispossession, labour precarity, displacement in the Anthropocene, and urban marginalisation.
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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 | 0.048 | 0.084 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.033 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Research integrity | 0.032 | 0.047 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".