“The city before the city”: Attempts at unravelling colonial violence in Canadian museums
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine if and how museums contribute to unravelling the fabric of settler colonialism in Canada and take them into view as institutions of the colonial education system: schools, universities and museums play key roles in constructing and spreading certain collective narratives and images, and in silencing others. While all states employ “imagined communities” to legitimate and reproduce the existing order, in colonial states this often includes images and narratives that emphasize the greatness of the colonizers as bringers of civilization. The violence perpetrated by colonization is usually left out. This is the case in Canada as well and is in stark contrast to the epistemic and structural violence that became established with colonial settlement. Our research investigated Canadian universities and museums’ efforts in working through their share in this colonial power system. Being key agents in general education, they select what and whose knowledge is in- or excluded but also have the potential to address conventionally learned misconceptions or distorted images. Canada started its official journey towards “reconciliation” in 2015. We ask whether and how museums take this up: What are they contributing to the declared effort to tackle the colonial system – of which they are a part? Results are presented from an online analysis of how universities and museums across Canada engage in communication strategies surrounding coloniality before we zoom in on museums and focus in more detail and in comparison, on how the Museum of Vancouver created a special space to grapple with the situation.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it