Social palliation: Canadian Muslims’ storied lives on living and dying By ParinDossa, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2021. 216 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social Palliation enriches diasporic studies by grounding memories of home within existential questions of life, death, and Islamic ethics of care.Set in Vancouver, British Columbia, Dossa's ethnography spans from May 2015 to May 2018, following the social lives of Iranian and South Asian Muslims who arrived in Canada in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.These Muslims migrated during their forties and fifties.Iranian Muslims left Iran to escape the socioeconomic turmoil that trailed the Iranian revolution.Similarly, Ismaili Muslims interviewed by Dossa have roots in East Africa, with many fleeing Uganda during the 1971 exodus of South Asians.Dossa underscores these Muslims' sentimental histories to examine how their intimate definitions of living influence their experiences with dying in a foreign land and their decisions to care through sacred traditions.Dossa unveils Islamic ethics of care through her methodological decisions to follow her interlocutors through home visits, conversations over tea, analysis of sacred traditions, and neighborhood strolls.Although Dossa had connections to British Columbia Hospice and Palliative Care Association (BCH-PCA), she found that biomedical palliative care frameworks do not fully capture the Iranian and Ismail Muslim social worlds.As such, Dossa's ethnography moves to resemble the vases of flowers that decorate Iranian and Ismaili homes, which she poetically outlines as a vignette in her fourth chapter.Her vignette describes a vase that delicately holds both withering and vibrant flowers.Each flower carries a unique life story but gains its vibrant character by lying next to the others.Similarly, Dossa's ethnography functions like a vase, holding together Iranian and Ismaili Muslims' histories to highlight their shared encounters with displacement.Dossa's work also retains the systems of oppression that hinder these Muslims' desire to recreate home.The image of dying flowers in a vase represents the ageism that Muslims face in a neoliberal economy.In her vignette, she writes, "At one time, …[the] [flowers] were fresh.Now as they are fading, they are looked upon with… the [societal] view that they will be disposed of soon" (112).As the vignette progresses, Dossa describes how lush green leaves support these dying flowers, symbolizing that wilting flowers have a living history.Dossa defines neoliberalism as a harmful force that reshapes social life by prioritizing individualism and market-based values.Consequently, this market-based framework disregards how these Muslims' wisdom and life histories mark social life before death and beyond monetary measures.As such, Dossa writes these ethnographic Muslim histories as living stories to emphasize how they use Islam and sacred traditions to attribute value to life and death amid material hardship.While writing her book, Dossa fixates on volumes of Rumi's poetry and Ginans, which reflect phrases her interlocutors often cited.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 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".