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Record W7119500767 · doi:10.6018/ijes.660851

Dehumanist resilience in Tracy Sorensen’s The vitals

2025· article· W7119500767 on OpenAlex
Susie O'brien

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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of English Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicEcocriticism and Environmental Literature
Canadian institutionsMcMaster University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMythologyPerspective (graphical)Resilience (materials science)PoliticsIntervention (counseling)Humanism

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper looks to Tracy Sorensen’s 2023 novel, The vitals, to help answer the question: what do we hope for –which bodies, which worlds– when we hope for resilience? The vitals narrates the experience of cancer from the perspective of the author’s abdominal organs and tumours. It is also, less obviously, an intervention into the cultural politics of climate change, informed by Sorensen’s many years as a climate activist. The book also reflects Sorensen’s recognition that climate change, like cancer, represents a challenge to the imagination that is partly attributable to myths of a hierarchical distinction between brain and body and between human and non-human modes of being. This paper reads The vitals as an experiment in dehumanism (Singh, 2018) that counters myths of humanist mastery with an emphasis on place-based imagination, organization and laughter.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.660
Threshold uncertainty score0.660

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.015
GPT teacher head0.294
Teacher spread0.279 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it