Residential Schools and Opinion-Making in the Era of Traumatized Subjects and Taxpayer-Citizens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay tracks the media-led production of a Canadian common sense about residential schools in the decade leading up to the 2005 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. Newspaper commentary on residential schools lawsuits accentuated the already constrained understanding of the agency, duration, and effects of the schools’ harm within private law. Civil litigation was a strategy for seeking the accountability of churches and government; however, arguments in the mainstream media repeatedly asserted that the wrong of residential schooling was limited to specific, individual crimes of sexual and physical assault. These arguments reinforced the parameters imposed by tort law. The newspaper commentaries cultivated a common sense about residential schools that drew on the discourse of trauma and a neo-liberal discourse delegitimizing claims on state resources. Trauma’s biographical scale and focus on the catastrophic event reinforced the emphasis on specific crimes. The neo-liberal taxpayer-citizen could empathize with the individual traumatized by violence, whilst dismissing broader claims about residential schooling. In newspaper commentary, then, residential schools became discursively dis-embedded from the broader framework of colonial policy. The claim of a collective experience of cultural loss was key in the struggle to resituate the schools within this framework; however, the recognition ultimately won may bear the imprint of a common sense that constrained what the recovery of culture could mean.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.054 | 0.115 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".