Between life and death: ghosts at the border in <i>les Ombres</i> by Zabus and Hippolyte
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article draws on the spectral representation of the migrant experience in the graphic novel Les Ombres (2013). Specifically, we are interested in how the medium and its ability to play with time and space create spectral scenes that disrupt the traditional flow of time to convey aspects of the migrant experience that resist narrative. The figure of the ghost reinforces the text’s formal elements that emphasise fluidity and permeability to more fully express the lived experience of liminality that migration is while also demonstrating that the migrant experience is one not so easily incorporated into the judicial language and codified legislation surrounding asylum seekers. In this way, the text manages to humanise the experience of those seeking asylum and criticise the nationalist, essentialist ideologies that underline how asylum seekers are ‘processed’ in the West. Through an analysis of the spectral scenes in the novel and the border aesthetics it unfolds, this article considers how the text expresses the migrant experience beyond the grammar of cultural essentialism.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".