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Record W4411373191 · doi:10.24847/v12i22025.611

The Undercommons of Beirut

2025· article· en· W4411373191 on OpenAlexaff
Sumayya Kassamali

Bibliographic record

VenueMashriq & Mahjar Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicMiddle East Politics and Society
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGeographyHistory

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article explores the urban worlds of African and Asian migrant domestic workers living in Beirut, Lebanon. Over the last two decades, many women who first arrived in the country as domestic workers have fled domestic confinement and entered Lebanon’s informal labor market, where after 2011 they were also joined by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing war across the country’s eastern border. Together with their male counterparts as well as diverse Lebanese citizens, migrant domestic workers have created a thriving underground layer to the city that includes religious and commercial establishments, mechanisms of informal service provision, and spaces of leisure, desire, and politics. Through an ethnographic analysis of intimate relations within these spaces, I designate this the “undercommons” of Beirut, drawing the term from Moten and Harney’s theorization of fugitivity and Black life. Forged in flight of the oppressive kafala system that regulates temporary migrant labor in much of the Middle East, the layered interdependences of this world constitute an undercommons of globalization itself.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.012
Threshold uncertainty score0.027

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0090.010
Scholarly communication0.0060.004
Open science0.0010.009
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.086
GPT teacher head0.314
Teacher spread0.228 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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