‘Rooted in the soil’: defining Dalitness as an ethic and worldview
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
This article, written by two Dalit scholars from different religions and nationalities, reflects on the contours of Dalitness as an ethic and worldview. Drawing on Dalit and Black writers, they put forward the praxis of Dalitness as ‘rooted in the soil’ to present Dalitness as negotiated, as lived, and dreamt rather than as always understood on dominant-caste society’s dehumanizing terms as broken, crushed, and damaged. Thinking through the praxis of rooted in the soil, they argue, offers methodological and ethical challenges that should concern readers and writers interested in questions and alternatives of awareness, intention, worldview, method, and material life/s rooted in communal imaginations of beauty and remedy amidst violence of Brahminism. In order to not essentialize such Dalitness as guaranteed by those born outside the caste system, they turn to Dalit novelist Vauhini Vara’s much-celebrated novel, The Immortal King Rao, to reflect on the function of Dalitness of the main protagonist of the novel, King Rao. They argue that beyond a label, Dalitness is a dynamic lived reality – a reality that emerges alongside an itinerary of contradictions that Dalit people deal with throughout their lives and a reclamation of their humanity in and through critiques of structures of domination in a caste-hierarchized world.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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