Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Drawing on a radical Durkheimian framework, this article analyses neoliberal morals, myths and the politics of ageing, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada, in which an inordinate number of elderly persons in long-term care died. Examining prevalent collective representations, we contend that older persons are differentially valued through two opposing yet structurally related sacral logics: the heroic and the abject . These logics express how neoliberal societies assign value to older populations through myths about moral purity and impurity, abjection, and sacredness. The heroic older person embodies neoliberal ideals of autonomy and self-management, while the abject form, defined by dependency, becomes disposable. During the pandemic, these subjective forms were mediated by a moral dynamic that we call fatalistic altruism , in which older persons accept their devaluation while feeling obligated to self-sacrifice. These dynamics reveal a deeper, pathological politics surrounding ‘the cult of humanity’.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".