“It Comes with Practice”: Pierogi-Making as Preserving and Imagining Polonia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pierogi-making is an everyday performance that is both an act of preservation and an active force that shapes the very heritage from which it draws. During participant observation that I engaged in with members of the Women’s Circle at a Polish Canadian cultural centre in Brantford, Ontario—referred to by its members as “the Hall”—in the summer of 2016, I was taught, through apprenticeship, how to make pierogi. The women under whom I apprenticed imagine the pierogi they make as being traditional in that they believe the recipe is drawn from an archive formed collectively by Polish Canadians. However, pierogi-makers also incorporate their own imaginings of what constitutes a traditional pierogi based on their individual experiences, lived realities, and desires for the future. While there is a passing down of what members of the Women’s Circle imagine as being the heritage of Polonia, those images are also rearticulated through an everyday performance that both conforms to and defies an imagined heritage that, like the act of making pierogi, “comes with practice.” Polish Canadians embody a quintessential migrant reality that exists between past, present, and future, between there and here, as formed by the experiences, performances, and imagination of its members. If Polonia is an imaginary, then pierogi are a punctum from which people of Polish descent draw their heritage. I argue that pierogi function as a kind of imagistic landscape on and through which the nation of Polonia is imagined and performed by its members.
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) | 0.005 | 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 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".