Autoimmunities after COVID: An Interview with Cindy Patton
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cindy Patton is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. An early AIDS activist in Boston, she holds a PhD in Communications from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. After inaugurating her academic career at Temple University (Rhetoric and Community) and Emory University (Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts), she accepted a Canada Research Chair in Community, Culture and Health at Simon Fraser (2003-15). In that capacity, she worked with more than two dozen groups to develop small community-driven projects related to HIV/AIDS, housing, social welfare, mental health, while achieving, culminating in the creation of the Community Health Online Digital Research Resource, a catalogued, open-access, full-text collection of the materials from those groups (www.chodarr.org). Her academic publications span the social study of medicine, especially AIDS; social movement theory; gender studies; and media studies. She is the coeditor of Queer Diasporas (2000) and a special issue of Cultural Studies on Pierre Bourdieu (2003). She is the author of such works as Globalizing AIDS (2002), Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film (1997), Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (1996), Inventing AIDS (1990), and LA Plays Itself/Boys in the Sand: A Queer Film Classic (2014). Taken collectively, Patton’s scholarship and activism has laid the foundation for insights in the health humanities, particularly AIDS studies, that consider the inextricable connections between epidemiology and ideology. Patton’s theorizations of stigma and discrimination patterns, her deconstruction of “truth” discourses subtending science, her critical re-evaluations of axioms associated with risk, safe sex, community, and knowledge production have been crucial interventions in the understanding of health and illness as cultural and discursive scripts. Among Patton’s most enduring contributions has been her theorization of how “African AIDS” was invented and circulated—that is, the notion of geographically bifurcated HIV pandemics split by the essential linkage between Africa and blackness generally with pathogenesis. Equally influential has been her elaboration of the insurgent queer research practices that fused with antiracist struggle to combat this split. In the interview below, Travis Alexander and Nishant Shahani engage Patton in a discussion on a range of topics—from (dis)continuities between the HIV/AIDS and COVID pandemics to the role of queer activism in forging epidemiological counter-publics and the geopolitics of medical bureaucracy.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.056 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".