When a fish is not just a fish: sharing country food as communicative practice in co-management
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public participation is commonly performed through public hearings which are largely shaped by modern ontology – the dominant Western paradigm – as reflected in Habermas’ communicative norms privileging rationality, argumentation, language, formality, expertise, and institutional authority. Yet silence and performative storytelling serve as meaningful communicative practice for many Inuit. In Nunavut, participatory democracy is practiced through public hearings – a key way in which the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board engages communities in decision-making. Hearings were convened in 2020 on Government of Nunavut proposals to further restrict caribou harvesting, affecting four communities. Analyzing public participation as communicative practice, this paper explores the act of sharing country food – dried Arctic char, or piffi – by a community member at the caribou hearings, and unveils critical discourses of harvesting evoked by this act. As embodied and emplaced communicative practice, this act not only asserted sovereignty, but reshaped deliberative space through generative refusal of Habermas’ communicative norms, opening a world enlivened by Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. Yet, sharing piffi was largely invisibilized – neither detailed within the official transcript, nor elaborated upon in formal proceedings. Strengthening participatory democracy necessitates careful attention to whose voice is heard, and the creation of ontologically pluralist spaces of decision-making.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 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".