A Project Toward Black Life: Teaching Black Studies in the Humanities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By primarily locating the study of Black people through the lens of victimhood and pathology, university research and teaching often reinforce the notion of Blackness as social, cultural, and economic deficit. Centring Black ideas, art, and imagination as critical to a reformulation of the racist logic of Western thought offers a model for engaging the histories of Black peoples in Canada that exceeds a simple anti-racism lens. Invoking the early 19th-century debate about Black education between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois and drawing on lessons learned through the creation of a Black Canadian Studies Certificate at York University in Toronto, Canada, this article suggests that positioning Black studies within the humanities offers a different set of theoretical paradigms for thinking about human relationships and human possibilities. Understanding Black studies as a project toward, and not against, Black life reveals the critical role Black studies plays both in transforming the core character of universities and the societies in which we live.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.059 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".