Refeudalizing the Public Sphere: "Manipulated Publicity" in the Canadian Debate on GM Foods
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article develops Habermas' concept of refeudalization in a critical assessment of the public debate surrounding genetically modified (GM) food in Canada. A recent initiative by the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Committee, a federal consultative body, is evaluated according to the normative criteria of Habermas' ideal-typical public sphere. In turn, the case study uses Habermas' account of the structural transformation of the public sphere to examine ways in which political-economic conditions under globalization impinge upon the prospects for rational-critical public debate. I argue that external economic pressure associated with the drive for international competitiveness in an increasingly globalized economy has spurred the Canadian state to embrace contradictory roles vis à vis GM food. Given the state's role in regulating and actively promoting the technology, government-sponsored public consultations have taken on the aura of public relations and have risked foreclosing meaningful opportunities for debate. Cet article développe le concept de la « ré-féodalisation » de Habermas en l'appliquant envers une évaluation critique du débat public encadrant les organismes génétiquement modifiés (OGMs) au Canada. Une initiative récente menue par le Comité Consultatif Canadien de la Biotechnologie, un corps consultatif fédéral, est évaluée d'après les critères normatifs du type-idéal de la sphère publique de Habermas. Par la suite, cette étude de cas utilise le compte rendu de Habermas de la transformation structurelle de la sphère publique pour examiner de quelles façons de conditions économiques-politiques liées à la mondialisation influencent la possibilité d'un débat publique critico-rationnel. Je soutiens que la pression économique externe entendue par la poursuite de la compétitivité internationale au sein d'une économie de plus en plus mondialisée a incité l'état canadien à épouser de rôles contradictoires envers les aliments génétiquement modifiés. Étant donné le rôle de l'état en réglementant et en promouvant de façon active cette technologie, les consultations publiques sur l'initiative du gouvernement prennent l'air de relations publiques et risquent enlever d'occasions importantes pour le débat.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".