Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the liminality of dying through the lens of “deathbed experiences”: reports of events occurring towards the end of life subject to multiple, potentially conflicting explanations, both medical and transcendent. Examples include a dying person reporting conversation with a deceased relative or reaching towards something unseen. While deeply meaningful and metaphysically significant to some, others explain them in material terms: as opioid toxicity, delirium or similar. These differing explanations bring an ontological liminality into the clinical realm. Based on ethnographic research within a UK hospice and 42 interviews with palliative care staff, this piece puts deathbed experiences in conversation with anthropology’s “ontological turn.” It compares the responses of clinicians to those of ethnographers confronting ontological difference. Drawing specifically on the methodological strain within this literature, it argues for care in such moments to be informed by “recursivity.” The article considers the consequences of this recursive form of care more broadly with reference to the biopsychosocial model. It ends with a discussion of how to do research about recursive care in a suitably recursive way.
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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".