The refugee as an agent: insights from structuration theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical voices in academia and policy circles have increasingly drawn attention to the agency of refugees in displacement situations, questioning the prevalent image of refugees as silent, powerless subjects. Drawing on insights from Giddens' structuration theory, this thesis explores the concept of refugee agency and argues that it is shaped by structural conditions and vice versa. It contends that what makes the agency of refugees distinctive are the particular structures they encounter, including, but not limited to, the refugee camp, the special legal status of refugeehood, and the refugee's damaged relationship with his/her country of origin. To enable a more systematic analysis, a typology with four types of refugee agency is developed: bypassing, rejection, manipulation and assimilation. These theoretical conceptualizations are then applied to the case of the post-1993 Burundian refugees in Tanzania using ethnographic work and archival material from the UNHCR Archives.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".