“Your DNA Doesn’t Need to Be Your Destiny”: Colonialism, Public Health and the Financialization of Medicine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Health is increasingly understood as a metric of an individual’s dedication to practices of personal risk management. A cultural logic of atomistic individualism informs both the privatization of medicine in Canada and public health campaigns that address environmental determinants of health. This article contrasts the production of subjectivity in a private health clinic in Toronto to a contemporary public health campaign designed for First Nations, Inuit and Métis children. The study shows how financialization continues to operate through colonial structures today. In this comparison, the two prescribed responses to the presence of risk diverge significantly: the wealthy are interpellated as “health investors” and urged to take preventive measures against future disease, while marginalized and racialized communities are asked to take on the role of self-management to make incremental and necessarily short-term improvements to living conditions that are actually determined by the multifarious effects of colonialism. The logic informing both the personalized health industry and the personal finance industry work to obscure these determinisms, presenting a paradigm in which both genetic predisposition to disease and social class can be transcended through savvy investment, long-term planning, and pre-emptive risk management. These industries offer a vision of transformation based on the liberal fantasy of infinite mobility, claiming to provide the means through which individuals can change their social class and prevent future illness.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".