Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article starts with a provocation: can and should we be playfully indifferent to the differences that keep us from being able to trust each other? Can we imagine playing together in fieldwork and beyond in ways that allow our differences to not be made an object of scrutiny? Beginning from a seemingly minor yet weighty utterance—‘I trust you’ by a friend and mentor in Amman, Jordan—I reflect on the preoccupation with difference that can emerge when writing ethnographically about queer life and relations in contexts where visible gender and sexual ‘difference’ is both charged and potentially dangerous. This leads me to consider anthropology’s ambiguous role in both studying and defending the importance of social and cultural difference, and the role of identity politics in decolonial iterations of anthropology. Drawing on Madhavi Menon (2015) and especially Naisargi N. Davé’s (2023) recent theorization of indifference as a queer virtue, alongside María Lugones’s (1987) notion of playfulness as an openness to world-travelling, I develop the concept of ‘playful indifference’ both as a response to the politics of queer relation-building among artists and activists in Amman and as a suggestion as to how we might mobilize playfulness in order to remain open to trusting relations and the possibility of becoming otherwise (Povinelli, 2012). Playful indifference is proposed as a relational ethic and a politics of solidarity that observes, but also willfully disregards, paranoid hyper-attention to positionality and moralizing impulses of difference-making.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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 teacher head, 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".