Diaspora, Political Action, and Identity: A Case Study of Canada’s Indian Diaspora
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article challenges models of diaspora that predominately use categories-based frameworks to show heterogeneity within diasporas. The critique is that these models do not consider the diverse political activity of its members and that, by defining communities based on factors such as religion, region, and language divisions, they eventually render diasporic identities rigid and fixed within these parameters. While we recognize the need to understand categorical differences within a community, the major limitation of this approach is that it imposes a homogeneous understanding of diasporic subjects. Using the Indo-Canadian diaspora as a case study, this article shows that the political activity of diasporic subjects are complex, revealing a heterogeneous identity that cannot be determined by categorical assumptions. We document the varying political actions that emerge as a community acts or reacts to such incidents as India’s State of Emergency, and in Canada, to the procedural after-effects of the Air India bombing followed by the Air India Inquiry. We also attend to the economic and political influence the Indian diaspora has exercised through organized lobby groups within and between Canada and India. This case study shows that political action within the Indo-Canadian diaspora is determined by simultaneous consideration of its home-state and host-state identities and that mobilization around the political concerns of diasporic subjects cannot always be determined by their role within religious or linguistic commonalities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".