Narratives & discourses of Rwandan former refugees & genocide survivors in the USC-Shoah Archive & Western (US, UK, Italy, Canada) newspapers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation study examines the sensemaking and resilience expressions of Rwandan former refugees' and genocide survivors' (FRGSs') life-stories, as well as the characteristics of Western journalists' and media commentators' retellings and discussion of those life-stories. This topic is of interest to genocide survivor associations; international, national government and non-government institutions and organizations; social workers; and immigration and asylum lawyers, among other stake-holders. The primary research questions are 1) How is sensemaking and resilience expressed in the narratives and discourses of Rwandan former refugees and genocide survivors? 2) What are the differences between the ways Rwandan former refugees and genocide survivors (FRGS) tell their own stories, and the way other commentators tell or talk about their stories in the media? Narrative and discourse analysis methods were used to investigate the answers to those questions over a period of two years. The key findings suggest that Rwandan FRGSs express sensemaking and resilience in three main ways, namely: 1) locating personal experiences within or outside of the generally known/accepted historical narrative of the Rwandan genocide, 2) the provision of thematic narratives of lived personal experiences, and 3) recounting of specific details via time and place, description of past thoughts and states of being, and evaluations or interpretations. On the other hand, Western journalists and mass media commentators retell Rwandan FRGS life-stories by 1) simplifying the cause of the genocide as enmity between Tutsis and Hutus, with inadequate credit given to other responsible factors, 2) frequently covering and emphasizing stories of reconciliation between victims and perpetrators, and the resilience and survival of Rwandan survivors and the society-at-large, and 3) deliberately highlighting and using de-facto (unintended) interpretations of the commonality between the Rwandan and other genocides and mass conflicts.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".