Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study is a transnational ethnography of Jamaica’s diasporic real estate market. Synthesizing performative and institutional frameworks from economic sociology, I intervene in extant debates on diaspora and development over the nature of markets and their influence on diasporan attachments to nation. Rather than problematizing how an abstract market rationality influences diasporans’ incorporation into the nation, an economic sociology approach problematizes the role of diaspora engagement projects in constructing and transforming markets which incorporate the diaspora. Entering this problematic, this study asks: How do real estate professionals imagine the diasporan homebuyer, and what role does that imagination play in the conception of control of Jamaica’s housing market? What sales tactics and approaches do real estate professionals use to sell gated community homes to diasporans? How is the imagined diasporan homebuyer reflected and/or produced through those practices? How do they objectify both the product and the customer they are meant to attract? I argue the diasporan homebuyer is imagined according to three key tropes from Jamaican public discourse: diasporans are affluent relative to Jamaicans, nostalgic for a Jamaica they left but estranged from the Jamaica to which they wish to return. The affluent, nostalgic but estranged diasporan is understood as a solution to an historical problem in Jamaica’s housing industry: a market whose successive conceptions of control have cornered firms into building and selling homes unaffordable to most Jamaicans. These tropes form a schema of value for the gated community home and their intended customers. Sales practices informed by that schema objectify gated community homes through qualities of value, trust and security as concerns calculated to appeal to affluent, nostalgic and especially estranged homebuyers. At the same time, the diasporan homebuyer is objectified through a sales approach intended to exploit (or produce) the tension between nostalgia and estrangement. Real estate professionals value affluent, nostalgic and estranged diasporans as customers to whom they can commodify their own reputations and knowledge of Jamaica. As such, sales practices are designed to “sift” the heterogeneity of the real diaspora to find and/or perform the idealized diasporan homebuyer of professionals’ imaginations.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".