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Record W4224278059 · doi:10.1177/00113921221090253

Do we need a posthumanist sociology? Notes from the COVID-19 pandemic

2022· article· en· W4224278059 on OpenAlex
Mickey Vallee

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueCurrent Sociology · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGeographies of human-animal interactions
Canadian institutionsAthabasca University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSociologyAgency (philosophy)Argument (complex analysis)EpistemologyExceptionalismPosthumanismEnvironmental ethicsSocial scienceLawPolitical sciencePolitics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article asks whether we need a posthumanist sociology, arguing that such a perspective can export a good deal of useful methodological and theoretical insight into the sociological toolbox. A posthumanist sociology is not a flattened ontology, in which we find agency in all things living and non-living. A posthumanist sociology asks instead what we do with the fundamental question of becoming both more and less human, following a surge of interest in decentring human exceptionalism. Moreover, a posthumanist sociology returns to the question of what it means to be an intersectional being, to proliferate the involvement of entities at the intersections of histories and social structures. Thus, it is a perspective that emerges from within the conditions of related crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic has highlighted the need to decentre human exceptionalism, raising a challenge for sociologists to return to the premises of what it means to be a social being. In some sense, management of the pandemic already assumes a decentring. This article builds an argument by first reviewing what broadly constitutes a ‘posthumanist’ sociological perspective, then moves on to a case study of the interrelated human and non-human actors that constituted the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The case study usefully marks the intersection between human and non-human bodies as nodes in the interpretive production chain of this global event – one that acknowledges human extensions and connections to multispecies and ecological systems. Such interlinkages become foundational to interrogating what it means to become human in a posthuman world. The article ends on this posthuman question: under the posthuman condition, if we do not discern a difference between the human and other-than-human entities, how will this homogenization affect the human collective ability to enact and maintain cross-species and cross-entity protections?

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.570
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0060.004
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0090.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.152
GPT teacher head0.424
Teacher spread0.272 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it