Promoting the ‘arriviste’ city: Producing neoliberal urban identity and communities of consumption during the Edmonton Oilers’ 2006 playoff campaign
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the spring of 2006, the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Edmonton Oilers made a surprise run to the Stanley Cup final for the first time in 16 years. Predictably, hockey fans and media pundits responded enthusiastically to the one-time return to glory of their men’s professional hockey team. Drawing from threads of political economy, historical analysis, cultural studies and queer critique, we read selections of the print media coverage of the Oilers’ 2006 Cup run ‘against the grain’, juxtaposing the neoliberal strategies utilized to promote Edmonton with some of the lived realities in Alberta’s provincial capital. We argue that the discourses of community reiterated in the city’s main newspaper mobilize well-worn tropes of sport and civic boosterism through championship inspired communitas (Ingham and McDonald, 2003) with updated contemporary neoliberal twists. Specifically, the new stories contribute to the promotion of Edmonton as an arriviste city (Hiller, 2007): a mid-sized, intermediate city ready to shed its regional identity and compete on the national and indeed world stage; a city which continues to privilege affluent, white, masculinist elites, but does so in this early 21st-century iteration by incorporating and accommodating a variety of social identity-based groups. In particular, we focus on a discussion of how professional hockey and its print media representations can incorporate ethnic difference and queerness as civic elites strive to showcase Edmonton as a diverse and welcoming cosmopolitan centre.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".