Gender and Transnationalism in the Work of Immigration Agent Elise von Koerber, 1872–1884
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The history of nineteenth-century Canada is one of tentative nation-building when varied influences combined to determine the shape, content, and identity of the new country. Historians and anthropologists are increasingly using the concept of “transnationalism” both to emphasize that individual lives transcend national territory and to acknowledge the undeniable power that national states, cultures, and elites possess in delineating the parameters of multi-sited social spaces and their meaning. The study of immigration agents is a useful tool to demonstrate transcultural competency and its value to both the individual and the host society. Nearly all immigration agents in post-Confederation Canada were men, yet Elise von Koerber is one notable exception. Through her work, von Koerber, whose outlook was profoundly transnational, contested interpretations of the meaning of gender, ethnicity, and class from her own vantage point in the intellectual and ideological borderlands between Europe and North America. Although various currents in 1870s Canada and Continental Europe created a favourable climate for Koerber’s approach, her gendered transnationalism intersected and collided with national projects. Her ideas were cautiously endorsed on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1870s, yet lost ground to the dominant vision of Canada as integral part of the British Empire by the 1880s. L'histoire du Canada du XIXe siecle, c’est la tentative de bâtir un nouveau pays a une epoque ou les influences s’entremelaient pour en determiner la forme, le contenu et l’identite. Les historiens et les anthropologues utilisent de plus en plus le concept de « transnationalisme » a la fois pour marquer le fait que la vie individuelle transcende le territoire national et pour reconnaitre le pouvoir indeniable qu'ont les Etats-nations, les cultures et les elites de delimiter les parametres et le sens d’espaces sociaux a poles multiples. L’etude des agents d’immigration est utile pour demontrer la competence transculturelle et sa valeur tout autant pour l'individu que la societe d'accueil. Presque tous les agents d'immigration dans le Canada post-Confederation etaient des hommes. Elise von Koerber est une exception notable. Par son travail, von Koerber, dont les perspectives etaient profondement transnationales, contestait le sens que l'on pretait aux notions de genre, d'ethnicite et de la classe a travers le prisme intellectuel et ideologique a mi-chemin de l’Europe et de l’Amerique du Nord qu'etait le sien. Si des courants divers creaient un climat favorable a l'approche de von Koerber au Canada et dans l'Europe continentale des annees 1870 le transnationalisme de celle-ci se conjuguait et se butait aux projets nationaux. Durant les annees 1870, on a prudemment souscrit a ses idees des deux cotes de l'Atlantique, mais au cours des annees 1880, celles-ci ont perdu du terrain a la faveur de la vision dominante d'un Canada faisant partie integrante de l'Empire britannique.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".