‘You Can’t Eat Soap’: Reimagining COVID-19, Work, Family and Employment from the Global South
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article problematises the assumptions regarding work, family and employment that underlie the World Health Organization (WHO)’s COVID-19 guidelines. The scientific evidence grounding sanitary and social distancing recommendations is embedded in conceptualisations of work as skilled jobs in the formal economy and of family as urban and nuclear. These are Global North rather than universal paradigms. We build on theories from the South and an intersectional analysis of gender and class inequalities to highlight contextual complexities currently neglected in responses to COVID-19. We argue that building on both science and local knowledge can help democratise workable solutions for a range of different work, family and employment realities in the Global South. Finally, we propose a research agenda calling for strengthened North–South dialogue to provincialise knowledge, account for differences in histories, locality and resource-availability, and foster greater local participation in policy formulation regarding sanitary measures and vaccination campaigns.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| 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".