Heimish and home-ish: aging, Jewishness and the creation of home at a Toronto assisted-living residence, the Terraces of Baycrest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is an ethnographic study of how the elderly residents of the Terraces of Baycrest (the Terraces) - a Jewish assisted-living facility in Toronto - create and recreate tangible and intangible notions of home. While the Terraces is an ethno-specific setting, the diverse resident population incorporates many languages, experiences, beliefs and values. Nevertheless, through their shared cultural identities as Jews, old people, and as residents who live in the same institutional home, they form a unique collective group. This thesis examines the intricate relationships Terraces residents have not only with each other, but also with their current living space. In this instance, I am referring to both the larger home that is the institution, as well as to each individual home where residents actually live. In fact, residents live in both the institution as well as their private apartments. As such, they must constantly negotiate between the dichotomies of their spatial worlds. This thesis demonstrates that while we use ideal notions to talk about our spatial worlds: home and institution, religious and secular, public and private - the real story takes place in between these ideals. Home is not the physical structure, but the way we imbue spaces with value and meaning. Terraces residents achieve this in various ways: with the material objects they use to personalize their private spaces; by sharing and participating in Jewish creative rituals in public and private spaces; by sociability and hospitality; and by shared ethnic and cultural identities. Finally, this thesis suggests that although home is constructed through objects and the creation of meaningful space, home also is a feeling. As such, residents construct home so that they can feel at home - in turn, this allows them to live in comfort and to age well.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".