Building Capacity for Alternative Knowledge: The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents a case study of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) – the main left-oriented think tank of national scope in Canada. We first recount the development of the organization from 1980 to present, emphasizing the challenges it has faced in building capacity for alternative knowledge production and mobilization. We next locate the CCPA within its neighborhood of online communicative relations, which comprises a region of the broader political field in which neoliberalism has been hegemonic since the 1980s. Against this hegemony, the CCPA’s project has been to expose the problems of neoliberalism, on the basis of applied research, and to advance a project of social-democratization by engaging with the general public and cultivating counterpublics in civil society. The emancipatory project motivating the CCPA has set it on a trajectory distinct from that of conventional think tanks, whose practices and networks facilitate elite policy-planning in and around the state.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".