Dirtbags and Bougie Boats: Precarity, Authenticity, and Experiences with Nature Among the Young Middle-Class
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores how members of the young middle class create, maintain, and challenge conceptualizations of authenticity, emotional management, and feelings of precarity through encounters with nature.My participants were young, middle-class whitewater kayakers in and around the Ottawa area.However, almost all my participants have travelled around the country and nearby by northern states of America to engage in different white-water runs prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, and most had travelled to three or more countries to engage with experiences with nature or wilderness.Through participation and observation on two white-water runs, as well as group and individual interviews, my research investigated questions like how are interactions with nature understood or experienced when there is the perception of class precarity rather than stability?How are ideas of middle-class professionalism and perfection understood in relation to the casual, earthy, "dirtbag" mentality of kayakers?What are the roles of emotion, emotional regulation, and experience for the young middle class?Finally, how is authenticity within interactions with nature sought and experienced?My research found that the young middle class use experiences with nature in complex and sometimes contradictory ways.Rather then simply as an escape, often experiences with nature are used to both challenge and affirm their identity status.However, there exists tension between feelings of authenticity, precarity, and the joy of experiences with nature and the drive towards career success and traditional middle-class values.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".