The "Present Referent": Nonhuman Animal Sacrifice and the Constitution of Dominant Albertan Identity
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 the summer of 2012, “meat” themed posters were hung throughout the city of Edmonton, Alberta. A textual analysis of three of the posters from this collection revels that the concept of sacrifice (Derrida, The Animal) is more appropriate to describe “meat”-eating in Alberta than the concept of the absent referent (Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat). These posters celebrate the consumption of “meat” and unabashedly make evident the living animal origins of “meat.” I argue that that the prominence of the cattle industry relative to Alberta’s economy, and its ties to the production and reproduction of dominant Albertan identity negate the requirement of the absent referent. The consumption of “beef” is largely considered an expression of loyalty to the region, and as a means to preserve Alberta’s (imagined) heritage (Blue, “If it ain’t Alberta”; Korniek). The noncriminal putting to death of nonhuman animals can instead be understood as symbolic and literal sacrifices in the constitution of dominant Albertan identity and economy (Derrida, The Animal). As such, this paper makes an intervention into ecofeminist literature as well as vegan literature written for mainstream populations that employ the absent referent in the aim of countering “meat”-eating practices (Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat, Pornography of Meat; Foer; Freedman and Barnounin; Joy; Robbins; Singer).
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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