Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This introductory chapter raises the questions of how and why sociology has contributed to the construction of the “Middle East” as an area of study through a process of geocultural mapping—but also, and conversely, how this fiction has influenced the formation of key coordinates within the dominant paradigms of Western sociology. It explores how the Euro-American fiction of the Middle East (often supported by the Western orientalist essentialization of Islam) has led, through various twists and turns, from the late 19th century to the beginning of the 21st, to the portrayal of the Middle East in a contrasting chiaroscuro to the Western self-image as the harbinger of social progress and secular culture. The chapter argues that the Middle East provides a theoretical borderland in the history of sociological thought, given that the Western fiction of the Middle East as a region is integral to the historical role that sociology has played in the Western construction of modernity. It concludes by suggesting that the sociology of the Middle East needs to deepen its critical examination of its relations with the legacy of Western colonialism and the new dynamics of global power. This step requires an integration of the study of “South-South” and “East-East” connectedness and circulation in history and the present—all while resisting the temptation of a full “indigenization” of sociological knowledge, which risks reproducing the false binaries of modernity/progress versus authenticity/tradition: epistemic ghosts that the Western sociological canon has conjured up in order to perpetuate the West’s own intellectual hegemony.
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 | 0.010 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.050 | 0.013 |
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".