Storying business histories: a Canadian Alouette woman’s spiral through space and time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose There are more than 120 Canadian women who worked on the design, manufacturing, testing, launch and operation of the Alouette I satellite, launched into space during the Cold War era’s race to space. And yet, these women are positioned outside of space business and labour histories. The author aims to influence and dismantle this hegemonic positioning and celebrate one of these women’s histories in the present and future by asking and providing a plausible answer to How do you build and share histories of a hidden, invisible or forgotten science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-professional woman? Design/methodology/approach The author embraces a poststructural intersectional feminist lens within the postmodern histories approach coupled with the gendered antenarratives theoretical framework to dismantle these knowledge hierarchies. Based on primary source interviews, archival documents and photographs from 1950 to 1979, the author weaves these collected data with the Canadian space industrial historical context, carefully choosing who is placed at the center of this study, while also considering how she obtained, shared, and meaningfully engaged with historical discontinuous bodies of discourses (re)created into a Canadian Alouette woman’s spiral of storying. Findings The reader is invited to jump into the spiral of storying at the dawn of the Canadian capitalist space industry. This spiral is presented via writing differently and speculative fiction, offering a dialogical web that moves beyond the structural boundaries created by previous Alouette I grand narratives. By using this storying approach, the author contributes to women’s and gender historians’ efforts to celebrate and engage with more diverse histories and to disrupt the hegemonic positioning of women outside the boundaries of space business and labour histories. Originality/value This research stands apart from other space histories as the author aims to distance her (re)production of gendered living stories from the practice of grand narratives. Furthermore, this study, framed within the poststructural intersectional feminist lens, is a deliberate act to deviate from the liberal feminist lens that permeates the treatment of women in business and labour historical studies. She also refocuses our attention on a Canadian woman’s space contributions that were hidden in archival boxes. Arguing that we must continue to obtain, share and meaningfully engage with STEM professional women’s experiences in the space industry, this manuscript inspires girls and young women in the present and future to continue to reach for the stars.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.058 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".