Between Discomfort and Comfort: Towards Language that Creates Space for Social Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Setting the ContextIn June 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released its ninety-four calls to action as, in the language of Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair, chair of the TRC, a "first step toward redressing the legacy of Indian Residential Schools and advancing the process of reconciliation" (para.2).Across Canada, conversations about responding meaningfully and respectfully to the calls to action began.Perhaps especially for those of us embedded in educational institutions, and reading for the range of actions that invoke education, the conversations had (and continue to have) a sense of urgency and great significance.The TRC's calls to action imply changes for and by non-Indigenous Canadian institutions and citizens.That is, the person who is increasingly being termed the "settler" is called upon to change.Or, as Paulette Regan asks in her Unsettling the Settler Within (2010), "How can we, as non-Indigenous people, unsettle ourselves to name and then transform the settler-the colonizer who lurks within-not just in words but by our actions, as we confront the history of colonization, violence, racism, and injustice that remains part of the IRS [Indian Residential Schools] legacy today?" (p.11).In this paper, I examine the potential of the term "settler ally" to create productive discomfort alongside productive comfort, thereby creating space for positive social change.My setting is Canada-Alberta in particular, Treaty 6 territory specifically-following the release of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015.This dialogue is informed by Megan Boler's "pedagogy of discomfort" and the work of scholars who've considered the potential and limitations of this theoretical framework.I argue that discomfort alone may be insufficient when the aim is to create positive social change and that comfort, offered through careful and care-filled language, may support the intended outcomes. Towards Discomforting LanguageFollowing the release of the recommendations, as conversations began within my own institution and my own communities, I noticed a willingness to create and explore the experience of discomfort through the
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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 | 0.035 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.188 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.041 | 0.042 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.038 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".