Searching for justice (and evidence) in public health: Exploring health equity in Canadian public health discourse and practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I examine the deployment of health equity in public health discourse and practice, theorizing its journey from its original commitment to social justice vis-à-vis injustice. As an empty signifier and vehicular idea, health equity is invoked within an infinitely extendable field of discourse and practice. Secondly, I analyse how health equity is made knowable through modes of measurement and representation. I argue possibilities for understanding and acting upon health (in)equity are shaped and limited by evidentiary norms/imperatives embedded in the rules of institutional fields. I historicise these evidentiary norms as mechanisms of government dating back to the enlightenment. By legitimizing and deploying action according to evidentiary productivity rather than normative-political reasoning, government effaces itself. I examine the relationship between precise but incomplete knowledges and justice, showing that however precise our knowledge is, if we do not engage with its incompleteness, we will always miss the mark, and inequities will persist.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.046 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".