The Disquieting Revolution: A Genealogy of Reason and Racism in the Québec Press
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within the past decade, a series of contentious events concerning the accommodation of different cultural and religious traditions and practices in Quebec has incited much debate in this region. Labelled the “reasonable accommodation” issue by the local press, this controversy, which has its roots in neo-nationalist sentiments born of the Quiet Revolution, has incited responses ranging from denunciations of racist discrimination to calls for more stringent measures to ensure the assimilation of non-Westerners into Québécois culture. As Monika Kin Gagnon points out, this concept has moved beyond its legal origins to become a “social discourse” in the culture at-large, in that many in Quebec are vocally expressing their anxieties over the idea that the rights of newcomers has reached a tipping point, whereby the limits of reason are now over-stretched, weakening the dominant population’s values and identity. Much of this fear was stoked by certain stakeholders in the 2007 Quebec election, namely politicians and media outlets, when reasonable accommodation was highlighted as a major issue. This paper provides an analysis of that election and the campaigns leading into it, revealing how the press and the leaders of the three major political parties were complicit in transforming some negligible and private incidents into a greater menace endangering the very existence of Quebec society. By tracing the genealogy of “the reasonable Québécois”, I will demonstrate how reason and racism became intertwined during the course of this debate over rights, identity, and citizenship in Quebec.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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; 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".