A week in the life of Margarite: the importance of situated identities in withdrawing life support
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
Medical technologies like mechanical ventilators have introduced complexities to end-of-life decision-making by placing patients in a liminal ‘zone of indistinction’, where their status as living or dying is uncertain. This paper examines a week in the life of Margarite, a 68-year-old woman intubated and ventilated due to pneumonia, to explore how her identity as a living or dying person was negotiated by healthcare professionals and family members. Drawing on the concept of situated identity, this study reveals how perceptions of Margarite’s status shifted over time and across contexts, influenced by medical information, cultural beliefs, and emotional dynamics. Initially viewed as a fighter, legitimising continued life support, Margarite’s status transitioned for some to that of a dying person, prompting calls for withdrawal of care to ensure a dignified death. Others remained uncertain, perceiving her as caught between these states. This case study highlights the fluid and situated nature of identity in end-of-life care and the challenges posed by indecision in the ‘zone of indistinction’. By centring on Margarite’s journey, this paper sheds light on how identity construction influences the decision to continue or withdraw life support.
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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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