<i>The Little Mermaid</i> and little Black girls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although underrepresentation in popular media remains an urgent area of inquiry, in recent years mass-media productions have created more representative images for youth of color. The Little Mermaid ’s 2023 remake marks the second Black actress (Halle Bailey) to assume the role of a princess in a live-action production in a Disney film, and the first Black performer of a princess role in a live-action theatrical release. Since media consumption and images greatly influence youth and their identity development, The Little Mermaid live-action film is an historic event for multiple generations of Black women and girls. This multi-study project uses qualitative mixed-method research to examine how this film’s representation impacts Black girls and their mothers in the US Deep South. Using sista circle methodology (SCM) with Black girls from the third to seventh grades and their mothers/aunts following a group screening, and qualitative survey data, we explore how a Black Disney princess in a fantastic underwater world engages and disrupts Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s Dark Fantastic Cycle. Specifically, this article seeks to examine two main research questions: 1) how is Ariel reimagined as a Black princess? and (2) how are Black daughters and mothers engaging with this film with regards to their own complex identities?
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".