Moving Us Nowhere: The Politics of Emotion and Civility in the Wake of the Quebec City Massacre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article critically examines responses to the 2017 Quebec City Mosque massacre as expressed in a letter written to the public by the killer's parents in January 2018, and various forms of media coverage related to the letter. While the letter attempts to communicate the parents' grief and to express solidarity with Muslims affected by the attack, this article argues that Islamophobic logic is evident throughout, maintained precisely through the emotionality of the letter and media responses, and through the apparently well-intentioned gestures of empathy and solidarity they represent. This analysis draws on theoretical literature that contextualizes the roles of emotion and civility in constructing and reinforcing racialized boundaries, and in shaping the lived experiences of Muslims in Quebec and Canada. By further considering statements and responses from the Quebec Muslim community, this analysis also briefly discusses the ways in which the emotionality displayed by the victims' families and community seeks to refocus the conversation back onto the ongoing problem of anti-Muslim racism in Quebec and Canada, calling for a deeper accountability around this pervasive issue. Résumé: Cet article examine de manière critique les réactions à l'attentat de 2017 contre la grande mosquée de Québec, telles qu'exprimées dans une lettre écrite au public par les parents du meurtrier en janvier 2018, ainsi que sous diverses formes de couverture médiatique liée à la lettre. Alors que la lettre tente de communiquer le chagrin des parents et d'exprimer leur solidarité avec les musulmans touchés par cet attentat, cet article affirme qu'une logique islamophobe est évidente, maintenue précisément par l'émotivité de la lettre et de la couverture médiatique, ainsi que par les gestes bien intentionnées d'empathie et de solidarité qu'ils représentent. Cette analyse s'appuie sur une littérature théorique qui contextualise les rôles de l'émotion et de la civilité dans la construction et le renforcement de frontières raciales et dans la façonnement des expériences vécues par les musulmans au Québec et au Canada. En outre, en prenant en compte les déclarations et les réponses de la communauté musulmane à Québec, cette analyse aborde également brièvement la manière dont l'émotivité manifestée par les familles et la communauté des victimes cherche à recentrer le débat sur le problème actuel du racisme antimusulman au Québec et au Canada, et à insister sur une responsabilisation plus profonde autour de cette question omniprésente.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".