Show that we exist: Iraqi women’s stories, Rita Leistner, and her seeking human(ity) in the images of conflict
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents an analysis of one of the socio-artistic projects of the Canadian photographer Rita Leistner. Her work focuses mainly on how humans function during conflict and crises, including internal ones, but also includes initiatives related to environmental protection and fortitude displayed by her characters in everyday life. By focusing on the human condition and the situation of humanism today, Leistner demonstrates concern and a profound sense of empathy. Our reflections focus on the Safer here project, which tells the story of women incarcerated against their will in a Baghdad psychiatric hospital. Leistner presented their daily struggle for survival, their dignified lives, and how they come to terms with their plight. It was originally part of Unembedded, a project of four photojournalists stationed in Iraq. Our aim is to place Leistner’s story in a broader context that considers how war stories are created and presented to the world. We also consider the demanding and difficult role played by artists in this process, who try to find a balance between being interpreters and being historians. Leistner’s work shows her as, above all, an activist fighting for public attention and empathy for war victims. We use storytelling and visual analysis in our empirical investigations.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".