Schefferville revisited: The rise and fall (and rise again) of iron mining in Québec-Labrador
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The impact of “boom-bust” industrial cycles and mine closure on mining communities is a subject of long standing in research on extractive industries. Relatively few studies incorporate a historical, longitudinal approach to the economic and demographic changes associated with these cycles at a community and regional scale. This paper revisits a series of classic studies undertaken in the 1980s of industrial cycles in the Québec-Labrador mining region of Canada, and updates them by tracing some of the impacts of the rapid rise and fall of iron prices since the early 2000s. Drawing from field observations, community interactions, and socio-economic data on several regional mining settlements, it considers the social impacts of these increasingly rapid industrial cycles on northern mining communities, as well as Indigenous communities. Using the conceptual lens of staples theory and political economy, the paper explores the influence of past episodes of closure and dislocation on contemporary industrial cycles in the region. It also accounts for the shifting institutional and political contexts affecting recent mining cycles, including the role of the state, environmental issues, and Indigenous rights. The results reveal that continued reliance on mining keeps these remote communities tied to global trends in iron ore and steel production, meaning they will continue to be exposed to the stresses and strains of industrial cycles to come. However, these impacts are experienced differently across the region, based on intraregional differences in local demography, economy, and settlement history.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".