Social solidarity among Chinese Canadian evangelicals in short-term missions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines how Chinese-Canadian evangelicals (CCEs) maintain social solidarity through short-term missions (STMs) to China. STMs are pilgrimage-like service trips that entails an individual to travel to a distant place to engage in social service for one or two weeks. This research draws on theoretical insights from Randall Collins’ interaction ritual chains (IRC) theory to examine the intersections of ethnicity, religion, and emotions at the macro-, meso-, micro-, and situational levels. This study involved over 131 in-depth interviews with 48 STM participants, observations of four STMs in 2015, and a two-year ethnography of a sending church north of the Greater Toronto Area in 2015-16. My first empirical chapter takes a macro-level perspective to investigating the global missions phenomenon. My findings reveal that the religious discourses that motivate the collective actions of transnational Chinese fundamentalist organizations are unstable, and this unity based on a religious pan-Chinese ethnicity is challenged by linguistic, geographic, generational, and ideological fractures. In my second chapter analyzing the meso-level CCE congregations, I observed how they maintained their organizational focus by operating cyclically and how each congregation’s members actively participated to maintain the pursuit of their mission. In my third chapter, I focus on the micro-level motivations for CCEs to engage in STM action. I connect contemporary neuroscience to IRC theory’s conception of IR “chains,” and suggested the concept be revised to “entangled chains.” I discuss how acknowledging the emotional entanglement of various identities should drive the analytical discussion of the self in modernity. My final chapter examines how situations of putative spiritual conflicts allowed STMers to generate various collective-effervescence outcomes. This thesis contributes to the sociology of religion and emotions and our understanding of communities by uncovering how social solidarity is generated and sustained at multiple levels of social organization.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".