“This Weed is a Threat”: The Political Agency of Carrizo Cane in the US-Mexico Border
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores plant agency in State bordering. Drawing on posthumanism and new materialism, bordering is understood as a material and more-than-human process through which the motion of interacting material entities, both human and nonhuman, is regulated and ordered. The paper examines a case study of the entanglement between a plant (carrizo cane, Arundo donax), human bodies, border infrastructure, and terrain at the US-Mexico border. Using a qualitative methodology, findings show that this reed disrupts US bordering by obstructing the vision and mobility of border officers, the configuration of a visible perimeter, and the maintenance of border infrastructure and technology. Plant agency challenges anthropocentric understandings of bordering (the privilege of human agents and the hegemony of sight and the terrestrial), and of plants (resource and risk).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".