Alter(ing)native narratives: Agency, human rights and an ‘aesthetics of commitment’ in African films
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article challenges disability representation and discourse in current African cinematic production. The article explores the films, A Tune Away by Stanlee Ohikhuare (2021) and Petits rêves (‘Small Dreams’) by Mohamed Karrat (2020), and argues for an ‘aesthetics of commitment’, which eschews notions of victims as passive objects whose only recourse is societal pity. The article argues for ‘equity deserving’ subjects who are placed at the centre of cinematic and textual discourse and contends that these characters’ agency is founded on cinematic voice and responsibility to the story, within an African context. How stories are structured are paramount in this context, and the article examines the films’ narrative structures and visual signatures in order to determine how they create meaning and force engagement of the spectator beyond reflection and towards action.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it