racialisation, illness and my father: three vignettes
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
racialised people(s) continue to experience racism and inequity in and outside of healthcare settings, affecting their well-being (Hassen et al., 2021, p. 2; Gebhard, McLean and St. Denis, 2022;Geronimus, 2023).In this short piece, I present three vignettes that focus on my father and me in different spaces.In these vignettes, he is dying of cancer, and I am observing, listening to and conversing with him.My father was one of eight children who grew up in a small village near the city of Hoshiapur, part of the Indian state of Punjab.After his schooling, he was accepted into Marine College in Mumbai.His work as a marine engineer led him to migrate to Canada in the late 1960s.There he married my mother, and they had three children while working in their respective professions until retirement.My father loved cars and sport and was captain of his local cricket team, a group of diasporic friends from the Caribbean and India.The vignettes took place five years ago, when I travelled to Canada to be with him in his last days.In them, I connect feminist and race theory with lived experience to capture three interconnected moments of racialisation and illness that take place in a hospital, in a garden centre and on a bus (Ramazanoglu and Holland, 2002).Through these moments, I highlight the banality of racialisation that can demean and intensify the embodiment of life-changing illness in the everyday. the hospitalI waited with my father in a hospital room that had a bed and a big window through which the midafternoon daylight shone.We sat near the door on two chairs side by side.It was quiet.The specialist responsible for a new trial of cancer treatment entered with a clipboard and sat down across from him on a short stool with wheels.She was a white woman dressed in a white lab coat, loose navy trousers and sneakers.She asked my father some questions.He responded, but he chose to say more about his recent excruciating experiences of receiving radiation and if it was all worth it.She replied to his comments, saying, 'you have a chance to be at the forefront of medicine and to help make a difference'.He sank back slightly in his chair, shamed and glum in response to her tone, infantilising, glib and routine.Her
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 it