Generating Ambivalence: Media Representations of Canadian Transplant Tourism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses transplant tourism as one facet of the international organ trade. It asks whether mainstream media portrayals of Canadian transplant tourist journeys convey messages supportive of stronger efforts to stop extra-territorial organ purchase. A postcolonial theoretical approach using Mary Louise Pratt’s study of travel writing is employed to conduct a discourse analysis of Canadian media and cultural representation from 1988 to 2015. The public learns that transplant tourism is “bad” but understandable, and either not our problem or a symptom of another problem. Three forms this message takes are: the broader organ trade is a distant and insurmountable problem; transplant tourists are innocent victims; and, resolution of a larger, national organ scarcity problem will end transplant tourism. I conclude that the media generates ambivalence towards the issue of transplant tourism. Reader attention is drawn away from health outcomes and human rights, especially of organ providers – reasons Canada might do more to stop transplant tourism – towards the challenges faced by transplant tourists, with the effect of eclipsing public discussion of whether and how to stop Canadians from buying organs in other countries.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".