Did Somebody Say Community? Young People's Critiques of Conventional Community Narratives in the Context of a Local Drug Scene
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The language of community is ubiquitous in academic, public health, and policy discourse about drug using populations. Yet, it has been argued that in some settings, the parameters of "the drug user community" are far from self-evident. We undertook this ethnographic investigation to explore experiences and understandings of a "drug user community" (sometimes referred to more specifically as a "street youth community") among young people entrenched in Vancouver's inner city drug scene. Our findings revealed that in this context, conventional notions of community-that is, a social network characterized by commonality, mutual responsibility, solidarity, and/or stability-resonated with some youth. However, most questioned the value of membership within this community, in which what they had in common with other youth were ongoing experiences of poverty, marginalization, and social exclusion. Many felt membership in the drug user community precluded their ability to be responsible and productive citizens within the wider community of "mainstream society." Experiences of resource deprivation and everyday violence on the streets led many participants to emphasize the limited possibilities for community among their peers. We argue that it is important to critically examine heretofore essentializing assumptions about the nature of inner city drug user or street youth communities in order to better understand young people's needs and desires in these settings.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".