Hidden in Plain Sight: The Representation of Immigrants and Minorities in Political Science Textbooks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Textbooks frame students’ understanding of the discipline and signal which topics are important. Research suggests political science textbooks lack diverse perspectives, but much of this literature has focused on American texts. Do these findings travel? My analysis of Canadian politics textbooks shows although there is considerable diversity content, immigrants and minorities rarely appear as key political actors and almost never in the context of Parliament, the judiciary, or bureaucracy; rather, most of their coverage is siloed in the textbooks’ diversity-specific chapters. Issues related to inequality are largely glossed over, and exclusion is presented as a historical artefact. The findings suggest students’ first introduction to Canadian politics is generic and quite narrow, with insufficient attention to immigrants’ and minorities’ political contributions and experiences. These portrayals may limit students’ understanding of diversity and produce scholars who are ill-equipped to address questions of marginalization and injustice in broader society.
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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 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".