Resistance, Performativity, and Fragmentation: The Relational Arena of EDI/D in Canadian Higher Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonizing (EDI/D) have gained discursive centrality in Canadian higher education (HE) yet are criticized as performative. Donald’s work on “ethical relationality” understands colonialism as a denial of relations. Drawing on this work I analyze EDI/D in HE through a lens of relationship building. The study maps three institutional layers of EDI/D. The external layer is centred on confronting overt critique, with discourses about EDI/D as threatening academic freedom becoming more prevalent. The second layer focuses on the “mainstream” adoption of EDI/D. EDI/D became central in terminology, but HE culture is more resistant to change. The inner layer includes those engaged with EDI/D. It is grounded in collaboration, but also in containment and fragmentation of EDI/D initiatives. These layers reveal institutional gaslighting tactics that derail meaningful engagement with EDI/D. For EDI/D to be transformative, HE institutions must ground EDI/D in the difficult process of relationship building.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".