Over the Edge: Risk, Ecology, and Equivalency in Will Ferguson's <i>419</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Will Ferguson's 419 (2012), apparent equivalencies between Canadian and Nigerian risk-taking characters are contradicted by the reality of an uneven global playing field—one in which risk and reward, sacrifice and suffering, and the autonomy and skill to navigate dangerous situations successfully are distributed following lines of privilege and wealth that derive from colonial history and the globalized economy's North/South divisions. Drawing on risk theorists Mary Douglas and Ulrich Bech, I argue that, at the individual and interpersonal level, risk in 419 is more outsourced and offloaded than shared. Beyond individual risk, this novel of three locales—Calgary, Lagos, and the Niger Delta—details the ecological devastations of high-risk oil extraction in the Delta, links that activity fleetingly to Alberta oil, and yet elides the local effects of Alberta's oil industry. The novel's Nigerian plot makes vivid what Rob Nixon calls the globalized economy's "slow violence" toward the poor, but its lopsided representation of oil economies and ecologies—like its treatment of individual risk—throws off balance the very transcontinental equivalencies and correspondences it seems, on the surface, eager to establish. In the process, the novel compromises its treatment of the moral responsibility, justice, and accountability that Douglas sees as intrinsic to risk while limiting its ability to explore themes of environmental justice comparatively across disparate local ecologies put at risk by oil.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".