"Keeping the Kids out of Trouble": Extra-Domestic Labour and Social Reproduction in Toronto's Regent Park, 1959-2012
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is an historical ethnography of social reproduction in Regent Park, Canadas first public housing project. Built from 1948 to 1959 as part of a modernist slum clearance initiative, Regent Park was deemed a failure soon after it opened and was then stigmatised for decades thereafter, both for being a working-class enclave and for epitomising an outdated approach to city planning. A second redevelopment began in 2005, whereby the project is being demolished and rebuilt as a mix of subsidised and market housing, retail space, and other amenities. Despite its enduring stigmatisation, however, many current and former residents retain positive memories of Regent Park. Participants in this study tended to refer to it as a community, indicating senses of shared ownership and belonging that residents themselves built in everyday life. \nThis dissertation emphasises the capacity of working-class people to build and maintain community on their own terms, and in spite of multiple and intersecting constraints. To theorise community-building, I begin from the concept of social reproduction: the work of maintaining and replenishing stable living conditions, both day-to-day and across generations. Much of this work is domestic labour unpaid tasks done inside the household such as cooking, cleaning, and raising children. In Regent Park, social reproduction demanded even more of residents: the stability of households was often threatened by dangers and challenges unique to life in a stigmatised housing project, and it was largely left up to residents themselves to redress these. To account for the considerable effort this involved, I propose a concept adjacent to domestic labour that I call extra-domestic labour: unpaid work done outside the household, usually through informal collaboration among members of different households, that is necessary for social reproduction. Extra-domestic labour built community and fostered a territorial solidarity that, I argue, is the primary means through which Regent Parkers developed class consciousness. This was often expressed through emic class categories, which were defined in relation to the locality more so than the workplace, and through which people interpreted their position in the wider social order.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".