Political Acts and Public Voices: Paying Time and Attention to <i>The Public Servant</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2012 the Canadian public sector experienced widespread cutbacks, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of federal jobs. Responding to the demoralized culture of surveillance and censorship among public servants that followed the crisis, Common Boots Theatre (formerly Theatre Columbus), developed The Public Servant, created by Jennifer Brewin, Haley McGee, Sarah McVie, and Amy Rutherford. The Public Servant is a feminist, populist comedy that both skewers and ennobles the work of public servants. This article explores the political consequences of drawing attention to impossible situations through comedy, and considers the place of comedy in feminist cultural critique. The Public Servant celebrates the absurdity and mundane heartbreak of modern life through the emotional canon of the clown. The adventurous, subversive anarchy of the Lecoq school of clown, coupled with the decentralized power of collective creation, drives Common Boots Theatre toward work that confronts chaos and failure, making moments of loss and disaster generative and politically rich. The Public Servant demands that audiences examine the value of work in a changing political landscape. Will the status of women in government and leadership, and the way the public values their work, change with a new government?
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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 | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| 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".