Navigating fieldwork politics, practicalities and ethics in the upland borderlands of northern Vietnam
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I detail and evaluate the negotiations I had to broker to conduct ethnographic research on marketplace vendors and trade in the upland borderlands of northern Vietnam. Working with the analogy of the numerous 'lines' I was constrained by, had to manoeuvre around, and at times crossed over, I begin with a discussion of the 'official lines' or state regulations imposed upon my research and how I worked with, or negotiated these limitations. I then reveal the important 'border guards' or gatekeepers, such as local state actors and also field assistants, who enabled or constrained access to informants in numerous different ways. I also highlight the logistical and practical lines that I had to accept and indeed, often draw, to accomplish my study. I conclude with a consideration of how friendships in the field drew me beyond the lines I had originally drawn around my research. These relationships furthered my anxiety over the possibilities for conducting research that ultimately contributes towards social justice in a constrained political setting such as that which presently characterises Vietnam.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it