From the Census to the City: Representing South Asians in Canada and Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the 2006 Canadian Census, “South Asians” have constituted both Canada’s and Toronto’s most populous “visible minority group.” This article investigates the term “South Asian” along two lines of enquiry. First, through an examination of the Canadian Census, this article sheds light on how the state produced the term “South Asian.” The second aspect focuses on how this state classification has been used as the basis for antiracist activism and is inhabited and transformed as a critical transnational identity. I begin by tracing the emergence of the category “South Asian” in light of previous categories used in the Canadian Census since the migration of South Asians to Canada began in the early twentieth century. I then turn to narratives based on interviews with South Asians in Toronto to examine contemporary representations of this category. As a state category, I argue that the category “South Asian” homogenizes the diversity of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, and yet, as a diasporic identity, the term challenges the national divides of postcolonial South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. I conclude by suggesting that South Asian identities represent complex and multiple identities that should not be reduced to a simple and artificial category of the state.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".