Understanding the silent dimensions of social acceptability of a lithium project in the Cree community of Nemaska
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2015, Nemaska Lithium’s Whabouchi Project was the first lithium project in the Cree territory to receive provincial and federal environmental approvals. Based on the results of a doctoral research in public communication, this chapter consists of a case study of the Cree community of Nemaska and the Whabouchi Project. In collaboration with local organizations, data were collected through semi-structured interviews, direct observation, a focus group, and document analysis. We aimed to better understand how the perception of the mining project, the emotions it generated, and its impacts on social cohesion might influence a community’s capacity for deliberation. A typological analysis allowed us to situate the data collected within the broader historical, structural, and social context from which it emerged, and to identify two ideal types of relationships between mining companies and Indigenous communities: Forced union and control shift. Within the forced union relationship, mining activities elicit emotions and relational dynamics related to the impacts of colonial policies (political and intergenerational conflicts) and are seen as a threat to the Cree way of life and culture. On the other hand, when they are part of a control-shift relationship, mining activities are perceived as an economic lever, strengthening the social cohesion and cultural vitality of the community, in particular by preventing the exodus of young people and generating income for the purchase of hunting and fishing equipment. This type of relationship can take the form of a strategic alliance and result in the signing of an impact and benefit agreement.
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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 | 0.005 | 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 | 0.002 |
| 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".