Approaching the Freedom Convoy: Intra-disciplinary reflections on religion scholars as public intellectuals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This special issue crystalizes the reflections of a handful of Canadian scholars, initially written in the months following the Freedom Convoy’s occupation of downtown Ottawa (and then refined in the subsequent year), who consider the various ways in which the contemporary media oversimplified (or, more often, utterly ignored) the role(s) of religion in this event. This introduction uses the convoy’s occupation as an opportunity to revisit the role of the religious studies scholar as a public intellectual in contemporary Canada. In so doing, it explores the problem of hyperspecialization in the field of religious studies, the fraught discourse landscape in which all contemporary scholars of religion now operate, and the resultant frequent failure to operate as ‘critical rhetors’ (in Russell McCutcheon’s terms) when confronted by events like the convoy. It concludes by offering three practical observations: (1) engaging in intra-disciplinary conversations (like this one) better prepares scholars of religion to communicate with the public; (2) given that many scholars are employees of taxpayer-funded institutions (and thus are, by definition, ‘public intellectuals’), it behoves every scholar to decide what this means (no matter how idiosyncratically) and then to behave as such; and (3) thinking and writing about complex, messy phenomena like the convoy provides a valuable opportunity for scholars to articulate their own positions on who they are writing for and why – questions that no longer have simple answers in an era when much of scholarly production is no longer ensconced behind paywalled journals or within access-controlled academic libraries. This final point is, of course, informed by Laurie Patton’s cogent concluding reflections in Who Owns Religion?
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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 | 0.015 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.070 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| 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".