Lactation Newsmakers Column: An interview with Penny Van Esterik, MA, PHD
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is my great pleasure to interview Penny Van Esterik, who is truly a “foremother” in our field. Penny is an anthropologist, and it is that background that defines her approach to scholarship and practice. She was educated in both the United States and Canada and is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at York University in Toronto where she worked for 30 years. She has authored many books, chapters, and articles and continues to be a sought-after speaker. This interview was inspired by her keynote address at the 2018 Breastfeeding and Feminism International Conference, where she spoke about themes from her recently published book, The Dance of Nurture: Negotiating Infant Feeding (Van Esterik & O’Connor, 2017). Her 1989 book, Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy (Van Esterik, 1989), was widely read and helped us better position breastfeeding within the context of both food systems and gender. She has consulted with, among others, UNICEF, Wellstart Lactation Management, Canadian International Development Agency, the Population Council, and the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA). Her writing considers breastfeeding and nurture within many different contexts including culture, gender, work, food systems, HIV/AIDS, body politics, environmental sustainability, and human rights. Her work illustrates that the personal is political and the political, personal, reminding us to align our policies and practices to reflect the real stories and experiences of real people in their real contexts.
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 | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.006 |
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".