Making meaning in the time of AIDS: longitudinal narratives from the Malawi Journals Project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Malawi Journals Project is one of the longest-running observational field studies in rural sub-Saharan Africa, ongoing since 1999. The journals provide real-time accounts of the unfolding epidemic, from the days when AIDS was considered by rural Malawians to be a death sentence, through the advent of international AIDS organisations bearing advice on avoiding infections by self-control, and then the turn to institutionally-based efforts to control infection through HIV testing and antiretroviral medications. This paper examines the epistemological and substantive contributions of the Journals Project, which we and others who have analysed the journals have made to understanding the AIDS epidemic. The paper has three primary aims. The first is to provide evidence of the chasm between the top-down perspectives of global actors with a mandate to address the pandemic and the bottom-up perspectives of local actors trying to avoid dying from AIDS, perspectives that are often contradictory. Second, beyond what can be learned from the journals about individual and collective responses to AIDS, they suggest the value of longitudinal observational field studies as a method for understanding how cultural change occurs. And third, as an example of the potential of longitudinal field studies as a research method on AIDS as well as other topics, we have structured our argument around the broader empirical and theoretical debates in the social sciences featured in published and presented analyses of the Malawi journals data: multiple moral logics, the course of global flows of information and injunctions, and the collective deliberation that produces authoritative local knowledge.
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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 | 0.030 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| 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".