The morphing subject: analyzing the agency of mobile construction workers in the Alberta oil sands
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 contributes to existing scholarship on mobility regimes by examining how construction trades workers in the oil sands of northern Alberta, Canada undergo a transformation in keeping with the conditions of the resource industry fly-in fly-out (FIFO) regime. Labour studies in the construction industry emphasize its inevitable and high levels of mobile work, and the mobility regime literature emphasizes the systems and regulations that condition workers’ movements; but both literatures are in need of further exploration and explication of how movement and circulation might condition a transformation in worker subjectivity. We undertake a phenomenological examination of 25 interviews and over 100 hours of observations with workers conducted from 2014 to 2016 during a period of transition from boom to bust. We find that workers undergo an automorphosis in three key ways: into the immovability of the FIFO regime, into the logics of the circulation of oil capital and labour, and finally, into the overall objective conditions of FIFO-based resource extraction and its relentless but restless demands. We conclude by suggesting that mobile workers might thus develop a kind of ‘plastic agency’ that challenges us to revise the binary opposition between structural control and consciously adaptive subject.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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