Canadian food banks and the depoliticization of food insecurity at the individual and community levels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian social scientists have frequently pointed out the necessity of understanding food banks and food insecurity as political in relation to the institutionalization of food banks and their collective interactions with federal, provincial, and corporate bodies. However, a comprehensive understanding of this role must additionally engage with discursive practices at the community level. Food banks, from which hundreds of thousands of Canadians each month receive temporary relief from hunger, offer a wealth of information in this regard. This research was conducted by means of a discourse analysis of documentation produced and collected by a prominent British Columbia food bank. Overall, 1,391 documents were analyzed, totaling 3,285 pages and covering the time period from 1989 to 2008. In this paper, I discuss three prominent discourses exposed through the analysis of these documents, one concerning individualization and immediacy in regard to those who are food insecure, another concerning community membership and responsibility, and a third concerning the differentiation of services provided to different food bank users. I conclude that the reproduction of these particular discourses, along with the implementation of particular policies and procedures within the food bank, are key processes through which the possibility of a political conceptualization of food insecurity is diminished at the individual and the community levels.
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 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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".