Religious and Sociocultural Values and Their Role in Self-Identity Construction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Religious and sociocultural values play a significant role in constructing a person’s self-identity and influencing their choices. This paper explores the religious and sociocultural values depicted in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) and the impact of those values on Vivek's life decisions. Vivek's self-identity construction is highlighted, as well as how religious and sociocultural values influence his decisions and isolate him from the world of adults in favor of spending time with peers he trusts and who show more tolerance and openness toward his choices. Through a sociocultural and textual lens, this study traces Vivek's transformation, and how his lifestyle choices impact both his appearance and the discovery of himself. This paper outlines why the choices Vivek makes do not match the sociocultural and religious values of his community, which leads him to isolate himself and choose a life he prefers, away from his family and the world of adults. His choices lead him to a tragic end, with his bewildered mother finding her son dead, rolled in colorful fabric, at her front door. Vivek's disorienting blackouts distract his parents from recognizing the shifts taking place in their son's life, beginning with changes to his appearance: long hair, interest in makeup, and women's dresses. His parents find out after his death about the life Vivek led as a homosexual, which the religious and sociocultural values of the community could not appreciate or approve of.
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.
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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".