When fieldwork is forbidden: Ontological dilemmas, subjectivity and moral imperatives as constraints in the field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Undertaking fieldwork in a remote location with limited health care and transportation comes with inherent risks, but doing so with a small child, in a place where understandings of illness and malice may be of a fundamentally different nature than in the ethnographer’s home e, brings additional challenges and highlights the ethical dilemmas we may face in the field. This paper describes how continued fieldwork became impossibe when my infant son’s illness led to dilemmas that precluded the continuation of fieldwork. I take this experience as a starting point to interrogate the nature of being and reality and its real-world affects when working cross-culturally, especially in the realm of “metahuman” actors; issues of gender, identity and power in a discipline that is coming to terms with its colonialist roots, and the ethics of fieldwork in precarious situations. It takes a “hesitant” approach to the writing of a reflexive ethnography that includes more than human agents in one of anthropology’s most iconic locales.
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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 | 0.170 | 0.148 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.185 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".