Stigma, Destigmatization and Belonging in Time
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
In his book Stigma: Notes from the Management of Spoiled Identity, the American-Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman states that those who bear stigma can never truly shed the discredited characteristics that society attributes to them. Rather, the stigmatized can only hope for a transformation of self “ from someone with a particular blemish into someone with a record of having corrected a particular blemish” (Goffman 1986, 4). Society traps those who bear stigma through discourse in a separate temporal space in which they are always perceived through the lens of their discredited attributes. Stigma, in this way, “fixes” those who bear it in a separate and unequal time. The temporality of stigma also queries the nature of destigmatization, suggesting that those who struggle to rid themselves of stigma’s lingering taint also struggle to exit the temporal fixity that stigma imposes. This project seeks to center temporality and time in this struggle and asks, how might destigmatization look when viewed through a temporal lens? To investigate the temporality of this struggle against the fixity of stigmatizing discourse, this project uses the long struggle waged by African and African-descendant people against the lingering taint of racism, colorism, and colonialism as its lens. By examining the Pan-African discourses articulated at the 1919 Pan-African Congress, the 1945 Pan-African Congress, the 1955 Bandung Conference, and the 1963 inaugural meeting of the Organization of African Unity, this project explores how those who bear stigma articulate diverse and sometimes competing notions about the journey towards destigmatization, which is a struggle over belonging to an equal and dynamic time. This investigation centers on stigmatizing discourses about Black Africanity because they are historically entrenched, globally pervasive, and therefore uniquely suited to this project’s research aim.To chart how the stigmatized act through time, with time, and on time, it draws upon Jacques Rancière’s notion of equality, subjectivity, and the “temporal hierarchy” that divides time between those who have it and those who do not, to understand how Africans and African descendants have imagined a destigmatized time—a future of possibilities, potentialities, and hope.
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 | 0.000 | 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