Defining Narratives of Identity in Canadian Political Science: Accounting for the Absence of Race
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. This article maps how Canadian political science has considered and shaped the logic of “identity” across the institutional, societal and governance dimensions of this disciplinary subfield. Focusing on the ubiquitous analytic absence of “race” in the mainstream literature, this article argues that mainstream Canadian political science reproduces a logic that limits the conversation to particular dimensions of ‘identity’ (‘identity’ as a basis of political action, a collective phenomenon denoting sameness and a core aspect of individual/collective selfhood) at the expense of others (‘identity’ as a product of social or political action, a product of multiple and competing discourses and a governmentality). In addition to this logic of ‘identity’, eight methodological tendencies in the mainstream literature further impede analyses of ‘race’. By challenging these methodological tendencies, abandoning ‘identity’ as an analytic category and reflecting on the consequences of deactivating and erasing ‘race’, Canadian political scientists may become better equipped to interrogate the operating logic of ‘identity’, to substantively incorporate ‘race’ as a conceptual, analytic and explanatory device, and perhaps most critically, begin to redefine the canon. Résumé. Cet article retrace la manière dont la science politique canadienne a considéré et façonné la logique de «l'identité» dans certaines dimensions particulières de cette discipline, soit celles des institutions, de la société et de la gouvernance. En se concentrant sur l'absence prédominante du concept de «race» dans les analyses de la littérature conventionnelle, l'article soutient que la science politique canadienne dans la ligne du courant dominant reproduit une logique qui limite la conversation à certaines dimensions de «l'identité» (soit «l'identité» en tant que base de l'action politique, en tant que phénomène dénotant l'uniformité et en tant qu'aspect essentiel du moi individuel ou collectif) au détriment des autres (soit «l'identité» en tant que produit de l'action politique ou sociale, produit de discours multiples et rivaux, et gouvernementalité). Outre cette logique de «l'identité», huit tendances méthodologiques de la littérature conventionnelle entravent davantage les analyses de la «race». En contestant ces tendances méthodologiques, en abandonnant «l'identité» en tant que catégorie analytique et en réfléchissant aux conséquences de la désactivation et de l'effacement de la «race», les politicologues canadiens pourraient devenir mieux équipés pour interroger la logique opérante de «l'identité», pour incorporer la «race» de manière substantielle en tant que dispositif conceptuel, analytique et explicatif, et peut-être le plus important, pour commencer à redéfinir le canon.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 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; 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".