The Social Construction of Age and ‘Best Interests’ Discourses: An Intersectional Analysis of Canadian Immigration and Refugee Policy for Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Canada has received worldwide recognition for its implementation of the Canada Chairperson’s Guideline 3: Child Refugee Claimants. This informal immigration rights policy, statutorily authorized by the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, instructs immigration officials to provide special considerations to accompanied and unaccompanied child migrants. Our analysis examines the language of Guideline 3 to understand how the social construction of age influences the provision of protections. Our findings demonstrate that, although chronological age is prominently featured throughout Guideline 3, other factors known to impact the social construction of age, such as gender and cultural background, are only superficially discussed. The homogenized discourse of children within Guideline 3 illustrates the protection of an idealized conception of childhood, which does not accurately reflect the heterogeneity of migrant and asylum-seeking children. The implications of such an idealized notion of childhood in informal immigration rights policies delineates children worthy of protections, and children who are excluded.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".