Settler news media understandings of Wet’suwet’en sovereignty and the Coastal GasLink Pipeline: Discourses of territorial sovereignty, legality, and justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis uses the concept of the settler imaginary to conduct a critical discourse analysis of 113 news articles covering the Wet'suwet'en-CGL conflict.Specifically, I engage with 3 research questions: 1) What are the narratives that frame Wet'suwet'en dispossession as legal or "just"?2) How does mainstream media express understandings of territory and resource rights in the context of Wet'suwet'en assertions of sovereignty?3) How do these understandings relate to, or reflect, notions of settler reason?Mainstream media performs a discursive function in responding to Wet'suwet'en assertions of sovereignty, discursively moving claims into the jurisdiction of Canadian law.News articles create a discursive distance between the present dynamics of the Wet'suwet'en-CGL conflict and historic and ongoing settler colonialism.I argue news articles reflect a normative framework of rationality, one that justifies infringement of Wet'suwet'en title for the needs of extraction.
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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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".