Power and paradigms in accounts of Iran’s human rights situation: a case of epistemic injustice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates paradigms and power dynamics perpetuating epistemic injustice against Iranians seeking recognition as victims of systemic human rights abuses. Chapter One critiques three methodological paradigms—cultural relativism, cultural essentialism, and methodological nationalism—that influence discourse on cultural rights and identity in non-Western contexts. Chapter Two uses Ontological Security Theory to analyze how the states’ international representation of cultural identities and domination of cultural discourse within the United Nations clash with people’s cultural rights. Chapter Three explores the Iranian government’s communicative strategies and victim-based identity claims, hijacking the victimhood of Iranians as true victims of systemic human rights abuses. The findings advocate for a reconceptualization of cultural rights and cultural identity within international human rights law based on a cosmopolitan approach, de-essentializing identities and states’ withdrawal from the realm of culture and identity, acknowledging that human dignity relies fundamentally on autonomy and self-determination. This thesis also makes the case that conceptualizing identity, victimhood, and resistance should center around human suffering rather than the state-centric concept of internationally wrongful acts, as recognizing the priority of human dignity over state sovereignty minimizes the influence of states’ communicative strategies to politicize and hijack narratives of victimhood.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.114 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| 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".