Constitutive contradictions and "belonging" in Montreal : cultural mediaries and anthropological theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Front-line social service providers in Montreal, Quebec act as cultural mediaries facilitating immigrant and refugee integration into the host society. Cultural mediation requires practitioners to field many demanding, contradictory and overdetermined representations of person, place and culture. In this dissertation I argue that mediaries are uniquely positioned to construct temporal and dynamic borderzones where hypostatizations and their interstices generate conflicted cultural meanings. Far from postmodern celebrations of nomadic creativity, borderzones are agonistic, ephemeral spaces of powerful overdeterminations all about position and context. A working matrix of four variable sets is chosen as ethnographic data: (1) a set of theories; (2) narratives and histories about the city of Montreal, nationalism and belonging in Quebec, integration theory and policy, social work, and cultural mediation pedagogy; (3) narratives about belonging and cultural mediation from my interlocutors; and (4) my historical and positional contexts as an expatriate anglophone Québécoise researcher undertaking this project. Chapters explore how these variables overdetermine constructions of cultural mediation and this ethnography. I contend that cultural mediaries may be viewed as ethnographers' applied analogues given how they create, translate and negotiate dialectic/dialogic contrasts of cultural differences implicated in these variables. Three axes of philosophical thought are integrated and thereby modified when field data are socially positioned within analytic, dialectic conflicts: rational positivism (as positional binary logics and hegemonies), postmodernity (as relativism exemplified by hybridity and heteroglossia) and marxian overdetermination (as contextual variables defining Subjects as field effects). This ethnography establishes that conflicts sustain contrasts which form social field effects of human subjectivity as mobile, positional identifications and their communications. Logical binaries are shown to be constructed via individuals' signifying practices which generate interstitial borderzones for identity and culture which are necessarily dynamic, conflicted and ambiguous. Far from fixed binaries of positivist or structuralist logic which lead to reductionistic and totalizing theories, cultural mediaries utilize binaries in dialectic, overdetermined tensions as momentary, shifting sets. Acknowledging contradiction as intrinsic to constructions of meaning renders authoritative language and action necessarily ambivalent. From this emerges a complex political activism where subversion turns discursive conditions of dominance into difficult, creative uncertainties of cultural adaptation, invention and mutation.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.088 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".