Remaking the Self: Trauma, Teachable Moments, and the Biopolitics of Cancer Survivorship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As numerous scholars have noted, cancer survivorship is often represented in popular discourse as providing an opportunity for a physical, emotional, and spiritual makeover. However, this idea that cancer enables the self to be remade on all levels is also increasingly evoked in the field of psychosocial oncology. Exploring cancer survivorship as a biopolitical phenomenon, I focus on two concepts that have become central to understandings of the disease: the "teachable moment" and "post-traumatic growth." Drawing primarily on representations of cancer survivorship in the clinical literature, I suggest that cancer is increasingly seen to present a unique opportunity to catalyze the patient's physical and psychological development. In this framework, the patient can no longer be relied upon to transform him or herself: this change must be externally driven, with clinicians taking advantage of the trauma that cancer entails to kick-start the patient into action. Broadening my analysis to the concepts of "trauma" and "development" writ large, I go on to suggest that survivorship discourse seems to partake of a larger and relatively recent meta-narrative about development-both individual and societal--and the positive opportunity that trauma is seen to present to stimulate reconstruction on a grand scale.
Stored with the screening record, where it is evidence for the labels above.
How this classification was reachedexpand
The three-model screen
all 5,600 screened works →1 of 3 models called this metaresearch. This work is contested: it sits on the field's empirical boundary, and whether it counts depends on which model you asked. It is one of the 51 works in the disagreement dossier.
Critical analysis of how the psychosocial oncology literature constructs 'teachable moments' and 'post-traumatic growth' in cancer survivorship; an STS/medical-anthropology study of biomedical knowledge and its concepts, though survivorship itself is also an object.
The article analyzes cancer-survivorship discourse and biopolitics, not research practice.
Biopolitical reading of cancer survivorship discourse; object is patienthood and clinical culture, not research practice.
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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".