Making Canada Home: Snapshots of Syrian and Iraqi Newcomer Cultural Production in the Waterloo Region, 2016-2019
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the beginning of the Syrian Crisis in 2011, millions of refugees from Syria and Iraq have been displaced. Over 25,000 Syrian newcomers settled in Canada between 2015 and 2016.1 The Region of Waterloo, home to a population of approximately 535,000 by 2016,2 was where about 2,000 of these newcomers settled.3 This article argues that these newcomers have used arts and culture to navigate the difficulties of settlement and acculturation. Evidence from newspaper articles, interviews, and participant observation indicates that refugees from Syria and Iraq in this region have utilized dance and theatre to develop community that retains cultural connections and identity linked with Syria and the greater Levantine region. Professional and community arts initiatives spearheaded by refugees showcase how culture and identity are caught up in continuous circulations of culture that are geographically situated in the Canadian context. For Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the Waterloo Region, acculturation, nostalgia, and assimilation are complex and powerful sites of community.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".