Transformative provenance: memory work in the Palestinian diaspora
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
Provenance, as the foundational principle of archival studies, dictates that records with the same creator should be organized separately from those of a different creator. This idea of provenance, however, fails to consider different epistemologies of origin. Using an ethnographic study of the Palestinian diaspora in Southeast Michigan, this paper interrogates provenance through Palestinian epistemology and Palestinian futurism to theorize a transformative provenance that positions archival origins as both spatially and temporally unfixed. Rather than rejecting provenance, the concept is a useful departure point to consider how Western understandings of origin and custody can be broadened by other ways of knowing. In this article, I track the origins and custody of memories and stories, the main medium of records in this community, to highlight the culturally specific epistemologies involved in their preservation. I then propose a transformative provenance based on three qualities. First, intergenerational: Chain of custody belongs to both the past and the present, as stories belong to the time of a grandparent’s past exile and a grandchild’s present diaspora. Second, collective: With the spatial referent of memories being lost, ownership is shared within village kinship networks. Third, imaginative: Origins of memories exist in the past, present, and the future, as those in diaspora use memories to imagine future liberation. By grounding this analysis of Palestinian memory work within the community’s conceptualizations of knowledge organization, this paper contributes to current discourse around decolonial recordkeeping, non-Western epistemology, and the management of diaspora archives.
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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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