Bibliographic record
Abstract
Destruction is transnational: homes, places of worship, healing and community are annihilated and the landscapes of counties are altered. Meanwhile, civilians are left to grapple with their new realities. However, the attention afforded to these disasters varies depending on factors of race, ethnicity, creed, and nationality—the ties that are held dear are the very bonds that determine friends from foes. In most cases, however, news of violence is met by indifference. Individuals are unable to empathize with strangers whose lives are being shattered. This paper analyzes Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes (1999/tr.2002) in order to argue that the vehicle transporting one away from apathy is a re-visioning of friendship. Questions of focus include, how is empathy formed for those who are long-gone, or for those whose faces one cannot see? And how can friendship help bridge this gap? An ethical turn to analyzing friendships that can forge connections around the world requires a “re-visioning” of what it means to be a witness to another’s distress as outlined by Oliver Kelly in Witnessing: Beyond Recognition and Michel Foucault’s “Friendship as a way of Life.” In Earth and Ashes transit and re-visioning operate on two levels: physically across an unforgiving landscape to the coal mines, and emotionally through death and destruction to the eventual acceptance of infinite loss. This paper argues that progress down the road and past the checkpoint is enabled by fleeting relations working as vehicles: Dastaguir befriends a shopkeeper, a fellow bus passenger, and a servant who help facilitate his passage through the hazardous landscapes of war and trauma. As witnesses to Dastaguir’s transit, these friends help catalyse, and cauterise, exile from family, community, safety—from life itself until an ethical re-visioning of friendships beyond borders can occur.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".