Sing Fires of Justice: Exploring the Impact of a Community-based Music and Social Justice Tradition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a paper presented at the Festival 500 Symposium: The Power of Song, 2011, we concluded that through singing we are moved…mobilized into an action that advances our community and make clear the place of privileged people within Canadian society.Through Sing Fires of Justice, we explored a model where soulful, relevant, respectful and inclusive community is created, and lives of value and quality are cultivated and promoted.The eighth annual multi-faith, cross-cultural community choral event known as Sing Fires of Justice took place October 4-5, 2013 with a focus on the "Stolen Sisters," the more than 600 missing or murdered women of Canada's aboriginal communities.As people entered the beautiful downtown Lutheran church, the smell of burning sweetgrass denoted that in this formal Christian worship space, a special sacred place was being created through the traditional aboriginal ceremony of smudging.One enters a place decorated with Christian iconography expecting to hear the organ playing.On this occasion, the entering music was provided by Mino Ode Kwewak N'gamowak (Ojibway for "Good Hearted Women Singers"), a drumming circle of aboriginal women, singing, dancing, and drumming the traditions of gathering and welcoming.Our society faces unprecedented economic, environmental, social and cultural challenges.Sing Fires of Justice seeks to shine a light in dark places in order to raise public awareness and mobilize action.This is done by building a choral community comprised of university students, church and other faith based singers, and the public at large.Paul Friere's work notes that all around the world communities of oppressed peoples are finding their voice and seeking ways of liberation towards human flourishing.(Friere, 1986, 30 -32).Sing Fires provides a forum where the voice of the oppressed is raised and thus, together with the music, the event provides a firsthand opportunity to innovatively turn some of the current societal challenges into opportunities, with the goal to improve conditions, and little by little create a value base in society that seeks peace and justice in everyday life.On this most recent occasion, the internationally respected elder, writer, and orator, Lee Maracle, was our guest.Maracle is one of the most prolific aboriginal authors in Canada and a recognized authority on issues pertaining to aboriginal people and aboriginal literature.She is an award-winning poet, novelist, performance storyteller, scriptwriter, actor and keeper/mythmaker among the Stó:lō people from British Columbia.Accompanied by a projected slide show of images of the "stolen sisters," Maracle's spoken text, framed by musical selections from the massed choir and congregational singing, provided a multi-sensory impact on the participants.Our research explores the impact of such events on the choristers, organizers, and to some degree, those who come to witness and participate in the annual public gathering.Based upon earlier research on what it means to sing in a community choir (Willingham, 2001) this study probed more deeply into the values of combining choral singing with a peace and justice cause.
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 | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".