Never in Your Favour: Precarity, Trust, and Consumption in Suzanne Collins’s <i>The Hunger Games</i> Trilogy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy depicts a world of precarity. Through her construct of the authoritarian Capitol, Collins outlines a particular brand of totalitarian rule that operates not predominantly through fear, as might typically be expected within dystopian fiction, but through denying its citizens the opportunity to form trust bonds. Key to this strategy is the Capitol’s manipulation of foodways: both actual foodstuffs, and the cultural and political systems surrounding their acquisition and consumption. Reading the trilogy and its foodways through the lens of trust theory, this article argues for a new interpretation of Collins’s dystopia. Exploring the shifting control of food in The Hunger Games enables us to witness the micro-negotiations and transitions of trust that take place within the trilogy, which are closely linked to its emphasis on embodiment, community, and self-knowledge. The close connection between such negotiations and the figure of the child or adolescent, and the cultural work he or she is invoked to perform, suggests the significant value of trust as a critical tool through which we might nuance the operations of dystopian and utopian modes within the young adult novel.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".