(Re)producing d/Discourse as Unobtrusive Control: Identity Enactments of Complicity Among Aerial Acrobats
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 study investigates how workers enact occupational identities that reinforce institutional Discourses through mechanisms of unobtrusive occupational control. Through a phronetic iterative analysis of interview and Photovoice data from 27 circus aerial acrobats, we identify three identity enactments through which workers reproduce and sustain occupational norms: complicit masking, complicit risk-taking, and complicit anonymity and exploitation. These findings contribute to our understanding of identification and control processes by demonstrating how discursive and bodily identity enactments—framed as small “d” discourses—function recursively to uphold dominant institutional ideologies. The study expands upon a d/Discourse framework by illustrating the embodied dimensions of identity enactment, highlighting the value of arts-based elicitation methods in accessing lived experiences of body workers. Photovoice images revealed how performers engage identity enactments in the front-facing and backstage work sites, revealing how workers sustain harmful practices, simultaneously acknowledge the dangers of these practices, and refrain from challenging the status quo.
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 | 0.005 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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