The circulation of knowledge and practices across national borders in the early twentieth century: a focus on social reform organisations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we focus on the emergence of ideas and practices at a local level as the result of the transnational circulation of knowledge in social reform that became shared understandings in the transatlantic world of the early twentieth century. Bringing together the theoretical frameworks of transnational history with imperialism and post-colonialism studies, we revisit the results of two research projects on the settlement house movement and on the history of a childcare agency that were established in the same period in Toronto, Canada. The West End Crèche and St. Christopher House are examples of two organisations whose history can only be understood with respect to their transnational connections. Archival research reveals that the transnational activities of these organisations were immense; the imperial connections to Britain and the, often competitive, relations to the USA, were prevalent, as was social reform knowledge from continental Europe. These organisations, the outcome of local and transnational struggles and endeavours, became significant actors in the development of social services in Canada. We conclude with conceptual and methodological considerations for social work research and argue for a radically different framing of social work knowledge with the related set of questions about influences, strategies, resistances and translations.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".