But where's the body? Bodies, time, money, and the political economy of post-pandemic field research
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
Since the pandemic, field work has been transformed by shifts in the political economy affecting the material conditions underpinning research. In this research note, a research team considers their challenges and learning in completing field studies conducted in 2022, including intensified strains on time, money, researchers' bodies, and risks associated with illness and infection spread. We argue that a neoliberal "research super-hero" norm operates within the research community, rooted in a conception of high productivity that mingles uneasily, for many researchers, with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial social justice aims and responsibilities. Our 2022 fieldwork experience led us to notice how this norm has circulated within our explicitly feminist research team and nudged us to challenge it, while raising questions about how a "research-worker" norm can best be supported.
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 | 0.190 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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