For us, by us: political geographies of race, sexuality and health in the work of ethno-specific AIDS service organizations in global-multicultural Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation traces the role of racialization in the production of spaces of sexual health organizing and social service provision. Drawing on insights from geographies of sexualities and the literatures on critical race theory, it examines how spaces of care that emerged from local responses to HIV/AIDS in 1980s Toronto (e.g., AIDS service organizations or ASOs) became sites for the normalization of whiteness and the exclusion of people of colour. It also documents the ways that activists of colour disidentify with mainstream ASOs by naming the exclusions – and deadly effects – engendered by white normalization and by adopting “for us, by us” approaches to sexual health that symbolically and literally made specific spaces for people of colour. Central to these acts of disidentification, I argue, are geographical discourses and practices, which include place-making tactics that mark certain spaces as “ethno-specific” and the identification and targeting of particular sites (e.g., event-spaces, clubs, neighbourhoods) for sexual health outreach to communities of colour. This dissertation is based on case studies of three ethno-specific ASOs in Toronto: the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention, the Asian Community AIDS Services, and the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention. Interviews with current and former workers (board members, volunteers and paid staff) form the main archive – along with supplementary archival and media analysis and participant observations – for the analysis that follows. A consideration of the geographies of e-ASOs’ work highlights the political salience of race for sexual and health politics, and provides a forum for bringing geographies of sexualities into conversation with queer of colour analysis. It thus contributes to the theoretical and political project of anti-racist geographies of sexualities not only by naming the exclusions that people of colour face in sexual political spaces, but also by focusing on their tactics of survival, resilience and resistance.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".