Legislating abjection? Secondhand smoke, tobacco control policy and the public's health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the mid-1990s, the position that ‘no amount of secondhand smoke is safe’ has achieved hegemonic status in the field of public health. This has bolstered efforts in the tobacco control community to advocate for smoke-free legislation and a variety of countries around the world have implemented indoor smoking bans, with many others presently following suit. This article examines why secondhand smoke has been such a central focus in tobacco control and public health policy, despite the limitations of the available evidence base on its health impacts. I argue that public health responses to secondhand smoke can only be understood in relation to the liminal and transitive qualities of cigarette smoke and its capacity to dissolve the boundaries between bodies. My key goal is to illustrate the influence of cultural assessments about the nature of ‘risk’ on epidemiological standards of evidence. I contend that the subjectively experienced abjectness of cigarette smoke far more than the ‘objectively’ demonstrable harms to health it causes ultimately explains both popular and public health responses to the substance.
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 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 | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".