Containment - An examination of Roma health mediation in Romania
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis critically examines the ways in which “Roma health” is physically and discursively enacted in communities. Following a year of participant observation of the Roma health mediation programme in Romania, I borrow productive elements from post-colonial and intersectional theories to analyse the tensions and ambivalences that arise from interactions between mediators, community members, health professionals, and local authorities. Beginning with the case of a community which was rehoused in shipping containers after being evicted from their homes, the “container” emerges as an apposite metaphor which I have used to structure my thesis. The thesis investigates the “contained” nature of many segregated communities and how this influences their material and health conditions, as well as asking how this affects the construction of “Roma” communities. I analyse attempts at “containing” ethnicity within a categorical binary of “Roma” and “non-Roma”, while observing how the contestation and negotiation of this binary, along with its implicit hierarchies produces “leaky” categories. The thesis attends to the “containment” of health, exploring how in regard to hygiene, vaccination and reproductive health, participants map concepts of “good” and “bad” patients onto Roma ethnicity. In this context mediators are often constructed as actors who transform “bad patients” into “good patients.” I show how mediators use their involvement in creating “good patients” to produce local meanings of “citizenship” and “non-citizenship”, and how people responded by participating, resisting, negotiating, or perpetuating their positions within these classifications. Finally, while acknowledging the important contribution that health mediators bring to accessing health care, I discuss the mediators’ role in promoting a neoliberal approach to governing Roma communities. I suggest that Roma health mediation could learn from dialogical and emancipatory approaches to participatory interventions in health, which aim for transformative encounters between parties while also fostering critical consciousness and aiming to change communities’ structural environment.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".