The Thread in the Labyrinth: Entanglements of Legacy, Matter, and Meaning in End-of-Life Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores the practices of legacy in end-of-life care through an ethnographic study of a community-based hospice in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on interviews with hospice clients, volunteers, staff, healthcare providers, and bereavement industry professionals, alongside observation, the study examines how legacy is made, experienced, and understood by those who are dying and those who care for them. The central research questions ask: What does legacy mean for people who are dying and their carers? How do hospice volunteers shape, and become shaped by, their participation in legacy activities? And how do these practices resist, reinforce, and revise dominant assumptions about death and dying? Guided by agential realism, this dissertation conceptualizes legacy not as a fixed representation of self to be preserved, but as a dynamic, emergent process shaped through intra-actions among people, objects, environments, and histories. Findings are organized through the metaphor of the labyrinth, offering a layered and processual account of how legacy emerges through intra-action, relation, and transformation. In “walking inward”, the analysis begins with an exploration of how legacy takes shape through intra-actions between people and things and the apparatuses through which legacy takes shape. At “the centre”, the focus turns to diffraction and agential cuts, examining how legacy is refracted through multiple perspectives and shaped by institutional and structural boundaries that determine who has access to legacy work and under what conditions. In “walking outward”, the analysis emphasizes entanglement and response-ability, showing how legacy continues through others, especially volunteers who carry forward the traces of those for whom they cared. Across these stages, legacy is revealed not as something fixed or stable, but as a relational phenomenon that emerges most vividly when the self recedes, allowing legacy to take on a life of its own. By reframing legacy in this way, the dissertation challenges representationalist and ego-centric models common in end-of-life care, offering more ethically responsive and materially attuned possibilities for practice and policy.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.114 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".