<em>Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning</em> by Sarah Brophy [Review]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning engages a series of testimonial writings to address the question of whether or not it is possible to learn from AIDS.Brophy insists on this question at a time when scholarship on the AIDS epidemic is often frowned upon.AIDS may no longer be a sexy topic of inquiry, but it does remain an important one.The reality that many are still being infected, suffering through AIDS chemotherapy, or dying seems to have been lost in the North American context, particularly since the "Protease Moment" of 1996.Since then, responses to AIDS tend to have taken the form of a series of resistances based on the assumption that the AIDS crisis is over.AIDS is presumed to be "over here," in the sense of no longer being a crisis in North America but part of our difficult history, or "over there," insofar as it is only of concern for those living in Africa and Asia, and definitely not something we need to be concerned about.These resistances, these ways of compartmentalizing the AIDS epidemic by presuming it is either a subject for historical inquiry alone or that it now belongs to an even more distant group of "others," provide barriers to effective risk communication, including AIDS prevention campaigns and education.As Brophy points out in the introduction to her meditation on the psychical origins and implications of resistances to AIDS information, the idea that the AIDS crisis is over, at least in North America, veils the very real psychical and physical realities of HIV and obscures the wounds the epidemic continues to create.She counters the assumption that AIDS does not affect us, here and now, with a careful reading of a series of texts that explore in minute detail what it means to live with AIDS, both as a personal bodily reality and as a reality to which one bears witness.In looking to the particularities of the experience of AIDS, Brophy challenges her readers to contemplate what it might mean for us, here and now, to be implicated in the information of AIDS.She also challenges what has now become a common assumption in academic circles: that scholarly work on AIDS is passé.The "Cultural Spaces" series from the University of Toronto Press is to be commended for providing a forum for this countervailing voice.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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".