The Personal and the Political. The Child’s Body: Scientific Research and Public Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research Framework: This article examines the significance of the child’s body in contemporary societies and its influence on apparatus of scientific research and public intervention. Objectives: The objective is to show the politics of children’s bodies, health and lives, their historical manifestations between the late 18th and early 21st century and the way in which science, societal debates, and institutional and public policy contexts intersect. Methodology: This introduction is based on a multidisciplinary literature review that draws on sources in the fields of sociology, anthropology, history, and educational sciences. It is also the result of many years of research by the authors in collective research programs focused on children’s bodies and health. Results: Interest in the child’s body is not a recent phenomenon. It developed first in the crucible of the struggle against infant mortality, then in a biopolitics aimed at establishing or strengthening nation-states, and lastly in the medicalization of society and in changes in education and the family that put childhood at the heart of many public policies. The evolution of the status of the child, of being recognized as an actor and treated as sacred, combined with the concerns and uncertainties resulting from evolving family norms, have given rise to numerous programs of research and intervention. Conclusions: The politico-administrative and scientific spheres engage in dialogue on the subject of the child’s body, sometimes ignoring and sometimes reinforcing one other, drawing their legitimacy from different registers of normativity. Contribution: We show the specific forms of the “body politic” when it refers to children: its relationship to time; the practices of defining its entry into existence and its stages through life; the importance of transitions; the competition and normative conflicts between various actors; conditions of existence and power relations that segment childhoods and produce unequal lives. Knowledge and expertise have become a means of legitimizing the implementation of public actions with regard to childhood, although their flow between the scientific world and political arenas is not always linear or easy.
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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 | 0.026 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.100 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".