Taking Tragic Measures? Disability Studies’ Anti-Metrology and the Government of Thalidomide
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
This paper interrogates the relationship between thalidomiders, the name used by victims of the drug thalidomide, and the kinds of subjectivity assumed in disability studies as an activist research enterprise. The thalidomide case presents a fundamental challenge to disability studies’ understanding of tragedy. I begin by reviewing some founding and more recent literature in disability studies. Next, I discuss the thalidomide tragedy, and how victims groups are using their existence as tragic in order to participate in the drug’s regulation and the public narratives of the drug. In the third section of this paper, I discuss three perspectives on subject formation, the Foucauldian, the Heideggerian, and Actor-Network Theory, and ask how we can make sense of this instance tragic subject-formation. I make a distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ tragedy discourse, and conclude with a discussion of how disability studies might continue to talk about active tragedy.
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 | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| 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 it