Cultural Sociology and the Politics of Canonization: An Anglo-Canadian Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article offers a regional spotlight introduction to Anglo-Canadian cultural sociology. The question of what makes Canada unique has long preoccupied Canadian writers, artists, and policy makers, and is central to scholarly debates about Canadian sociology’s position relative to British, American, and other national sociologies, as well as the need for decolonization and diversification of the disciplinary canon. As a subfield, Anglo-Canadian cultural sociology receives little attention within these wider debates despite its emphasis on issues of cultural difference, identity, and evaluation. We provide an analysis of the dynamics of the field. Using course syllabi and survey data from instructors (N = 28), we examine whether there is a unique canon in Anglo-Canadian cultural sociology, and how cultural sociology is taught across Canada. Network analysis of texts assigned on syllabi and survey responses from cultural sociology instructors reveal, first, a thematic canon in Canadian cultural sociology, with a plurality of authors used to teach four main themes: identity and representation, cultural production, cultural consumption, and conceptualizing and measuring culture. Second, we find the positionality of Anglo-Canadian cultural sociology (with respect to both other national sociologies and neighboring subfields/disciplines) is uncertain and widely variant. Finally, survey responses concerning identity and representation suggest a reflexivity about the politics of canonization, and a gendered interest in decolonizing curricula. We conclude by arguing that a thematic canon in cultural sociology facilitates the maintenance of fuzzy boundaries with other subfields, national and Indigenous intellectual traditions, and a critical feminist lens.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".