Emerging Visions of Another world? Tensions and Collaboration at the Quebec Social Forum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Quebec Social Forum (QSF) took place 23-26 August 2007 in Montreal. It attracted about 5000 people from across Quebec. Both organizers and observers viewed the event as an unqualified success. In this article, we seek to describe and document this historic gathering and to understand it in its Quebec context, against the larger organizing process which produced it. We also situate the Social Forum, both as event and process, within the longer history of social mobilization in Quebec. Historicizing the Social Forum in this way helps us interpret its cleavages and conflicts more adequately and apprehend its larger significance. We argue that the conflicts that have plagued the organizing of the Quebec Social Forum are a reprise of those that appeared in the movement in the late 1990s and came to a head in the 2001 massive demonstrations against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas in Quebec City. The chasm then was widely perceived as one over tactics but we argue, then and now, it is more substantive than that. It is about the clash of profoundly different ethics, practices and theories of democracy and, beneath them, different horizons of hope and visions of transformation. The organizing of the Social Forum is the occasion for this debate, which may say something about the significance of the Social Forum more generally and the challenge it poses to established cultures and practices of politics on the left. The cleavage is generational but not only or simply. It signals a struggle and transition but the outcomes are not yet clear and are certainly not pre-ordained.
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 | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.069 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".