The Italian Quarantine Ship (Dystopia): Externalization Practices during COVID-19
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the use of quarantine ships in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic as a mechanism of border externalization and racialized containment. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted aboard two quarantine ships, it explores how these vessels, ostensibly established for health surveillance, functioned as securitized spaces that perpetuated inequalities and restricted access to asylum. The study situates quarantine ships within broader practices of European border control, highlighting their role in governing mobility through viapolitics and racialized bio-political techniques. By tracing the historical and political dimensions of quarantine and migration, the paper argues that these ships reflect long-standing practices of controlling disease and mobility as threats to the nation-state. Despite their disbandment in 2022, the legacy of quarantine ships underscores the enduring racialized violence embedded in European migration policies. This research contributes to critical discussions on border externalization, racial capitalism, and the Mediterranean as a contested space of mobility and exclusion.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".