Back-to-the-Land: Analyzing Rural Anarchist Practice in Relation to Anarchist Theories of Community-Building: A Case Study of the Dragonfly and Black Fly Land Collectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation problematizes the idea of the rural as a backwards and reactionary place and addresses the theoretical and practical contributions of anarchism to reconsidering the rural as a site of revolutionary community-building and an alternative to capitalism and state formations. I argue that anarchist theories offer a sophisticated vision of rural space because they think more concretely about the rural as an inhabited or inhabitable place informing more radical understanding of alternative community and political structures. I explore the history of intentional communities in North America and Ontario, specifically, to demonstrate the persistence of community-building experiments in rural settings and to document their alternative history. Using an empirical case study of two anarchist intentional communities located in Hastings County, Ontario, this dissertation examines how specific experiments of alternative community-building have operated in practice in relation to their anarchist principles. I situate the two collectives in the colonial history and the history of alternative communities in the area. The goals of creating anti-capitalist and decolonized communities are confronted with the geographic and political realities of land ownership. Some themes that emerged in this dissertation are private property relationships, settler relations, and ecological stewardship. While participants demonstrate a desire to move beyond private property relationships, they continue to see their responsibilities to Indigenous peoples and the environment in property terms. The anarchist ethical commitment to self-reflection opens up the importance of continually working to unlearn property and colonial relationships.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".