MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4407063380 · doi:10.1111/aman.28045

Pushpin memoir: Making meaning out of murder

2025· article· en· W4407063380 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Noelle Sullivan

Bibliographic record

VenueAmerican Anthropologist · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicWildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMemoirMeaning (existential)PsychoanalysisGenealogyHistorySociologyCriminologyPsychologyArt historyPhilosophyEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract In 2018, my brother Adam Colquhoun, nicknamed “Stretch,” was killed in a bar in Calgary, Alberta by a man he barely knew. Stretch was the kind of person society finds convenient to discard. His history of theft, illicit drug dealing, mental illness, addiction, and homelessness made his humanity “undesirable.” Nevertheless, lessons Stretch learned painfully over his lifetime had something to teach us. In 2016, he told me he wanted someone to write his biography. This paper explores how my brother's murder caused me to collapse the binary between personal and professional, and embrace memoir—a process differing substantially from writing ethnography. I thought of my approach as “pushpin memoir,” akin to a detective board where investigators stick bits of evidence in the aftermath of a crime. Pushpins comprise unusual, standout moments we hold onto among the quotidian we often forget. Meanings gleaned from Stretch's life allowed me to rethink the future of the man who killed him, and thus imagine broader possibilities for people whose actions cause irreparable harm. I ponder how centering the experiencing self feels crucial to future endeavors to write an anthropology that matters to broader publics I hope to engage.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.678
Threshold uncertainty score0.997

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.023
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.032
GPT teacher head0.353
Teacher spread0.322 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueAmerican AnthropologistSame topicWildlife Conservation and Criminology AnalysesFrench-language works237,207