Unsettling Expectations: (Un)certainty, Settler States of Feeling, Law, and Decolonization1
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Guaranteeing “certainty” (for governments, business development, society, etc.) is often the goal of state land rights settlements with Indigenous peoples in Canada. Certainty is also often seen as an unequivocally desirable and positive state of affairs. This paper explores how certainty and uncertainty intersect with the challenges of decolonization in North America. I explore how settler certainty and entitlement to Indigenous land has been constructed in past colonial and current national laws, land policies, and ideologies. Then, drawing on data from fieldwork among activists against land rights, I argue that their deep anger about their uncertainty regarding land and their futures helps to reveal how certainty and entitlement underpin “settler states of feeling” (Rifkin). If one persistent characteristic of settler colonialism is settler certainty and entitlement, then decolonization, both for settlers and for jurisprudence, may therefore mean embracing uncertainty. I conclude by discussing the relationship between certainty, uncertainty, and decolonization.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it