Pipeline negotiations as a challenging setting for organised cultural encounters:An Analysis of Mackenzie Gas Project Public Hearings from Berger Inquiry to Nowadays
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within the context of resource extraction, cultural encounters have been historically performed in the way of more or less antagonistic social interactions, ranging from outright domination to more empowerment-oriented relations. Throughout the last decades, the building of pipelines in particular has linked together countries, cultures, identities, ultimately challenging, reorganizing and renegotiating them. Starting from these premises, the following paper intends to show how Canadian Mackenzie Valley represents a unique contact zone for the development of cultural encounters, where different actors sometimes clash, but eventually “grapple with each other”. In order to do so, I look into the specific case of Mackenzie Valley Pipeline and its advancement from the early 70s to more recent times, to suggest that within this challenging setting - where indigenous peoples are constantly confronted with often competing interests and positions - the practice of public hearings can be approached as a form of organized cultural encounter, whose “implied purposes” are to deal with more or less substantial cultural differences and to provide a wider cultural understanding of each different position. Through the testimonies presented during the negotiations of the Mackenzie Gas Project, I explore the main features of the institutionalized practice of community hearings to suggest that this system has produced two main results, leading to the creation of: a) an essential forum for confrontation and articulation of cultural diversities and divergent perspectives on energy development and indigenous issues; b) a unique social space that has contributed to trigger phenomenon of identity transformation and new ways of structuring relations among the several pipeline stakeholders.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".