‘A paradise among leprosariums’: Hansen’s disease and affective containment in the Panama Canal Zone
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Panama Canal Zone’s American administration established Palo Seco Leper Colony in 1907 in order to contain individuals with Hansen’s disease. Yet containment was never a simple strategy. This article argues that American observers used rhetoric to transmute their fear of Hansen’s disease into pity, imagining isolation as a form of care and buttressing the United States’ claim that the curative violence of incarceration was part of a beneficent global project of humanitarianism, civilization, and modernity. At the same time, residents at Palo Seco often reworked or simply rejected these affective claims, and close attention to the archival record finds examples of their anger, love, and hope, as well as pain, stigma, and loneliness. Residents were labelled and consigned, ostensibly made static and ordered through diagnosis, but the site hosted a dynamism and disorder—in both senses of the word—that American imperialism professed to control, but never could. Palo Seco was a kind of emotional contact zone where managers, commentators, and residents negotiated the affective scripts and sentiments of their imperial encounter. Attention to these subjectivities testifies to the humanness, the ragged edges, and the profound affect of the imperial enterprise and its ableist institutions.
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 imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it