"The Being Together of Strangers": Dionne Brand’s Politics of Difference and the Limits of Multicultural Discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous, racialized, and diasporic thinkers have long challenged circumscription of the as a frame for cultural and political identifications within Canadian space, privileging instead trans- or subnational. Theorists like Smaro Kamboureli, Iris Marion Young, and Diana Brydon have shown how cultural products are firmly entangled with national imaginary and are therefore capable of resisting it. The theoretical frameworks requisite for understanding this phenomenon need to account for various forms of difference, especially class, gender, and sexual orientation. Dionne Brand's novel What We All Long For (2005) offers a vocabulary and poetics for how differences and alliances can crosscut foundational identity categories in unexpected ways. Brand offers an urban, cosmopolitan vision of a politics of difference that transcends limits of multicultural discourse, creating fictional cities where, in Young's phrase, difference is fostered through the being together of strangers.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.077 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".