Finding a home in the public sphere, challenging the social representations of politics: A case study of McGill University’s Women in House Programme, 2001–2005
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines young Canadian women’s conceptions of political power through qualitative interviews with participants of the McGill University’s Women in House Programme, 2001–2005, which documented the women’s first-hand experiences of shadowing women parliamentarians. I examine the female students’ social representations of political power within the Parliamentary process, and notably, how their internalisation of the influence that gender plays in shaping their own interest in engaging in formal politics. In spite of high levels of political knowledge and direct exposure to the political system, these young women continue to accept the dominant political and social discourses that portray them as excluded from the public sphere on the grounds of their gender, age, and in some instances, ethnicity and social class. I also explore how young women conceptualise and understand the social networks, and forms of capital and resources which are associated with access to the elite political community. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s theory of subaltern counterpublics, I argue that young women are in need of women-only spaces such as the Women in House programme in order to develop the sites of dialogue and deliberation needed to create counter-discourses that will enable them to challenge the discursive representations of social power within contemporary Canadian political processes. This paper draws on social psychological approaches and makes an important empirical contribution to the political science literature about the engagement and public participation of an under-represented political group.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.058 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".