Playing Promotional Politics: Mythologizing Hockey and Manufacturing “Ordinary” Canadians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over 15 years ago, Andrew Wernick described a new stage of promotion within the mainstream politics of advanced capitalist democracies through which political dialogue was effectively subsumed by the language and practices of contemporary marketing and image-making spectacles. In this article, we examine how the national sport of hockey and its associated traditions and cultural identities continue to be mythologized and deployed in the new millennium for the purpose of contemporary political promotional strategies. We argue that, as a central element of national popular culture, hockey remains the pre-eminent signifier of a particular ‘brand’ of Canadianness for the current federal Conservative Government as it massages its neoliberal political platform to a demographic of imagined, “ordinary Canadians”—a key concept of neoliberal discourse that is redefining citizenship and identity across contemporary Canada.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.062 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".