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Record W4412954156 · doi:10.1353/ari.2025.a966965

Locating Illicit Empathy: The Extractive Ecology of Marian Engel's Bear

2025· article· en· W4412954156 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Ji‐Won Choi

Bibliographic record

VenueAriel · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicWildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEmpathyEcologyGeographyPsychologyBiologySocial psychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract: This article demonstrates the indissociable role of empathy in sustaining the systemic violence of extractivism, a term describing the global drive to exhaustively extract resources. The article contends that empathy, as depicted in Marian Engel's Bear (1976), not only fails to serve as a corrective for settler colonial guilt but also reinforces extractivist logic. Although Engel has not been widely recognized as one of the Canadian authors addressing colonial dispossession and ecological depletion, her novel offers a witty exploration of the Canadian natural world and Indigeneity through the way that Lou, the protagonist of the novel, practices empathy. After Lou attempts to form a romantic relationship with the eponymous bear, the animal strikes her on her back, leaving a painful wound that is often interpreted as a symbol of her repentance and personal growth. However, its significance in the context of racialized empathy becomes more pronounced when compared to the strikingly similar slashed upper torso of an Indigenous woman in Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore's photograph Fringe (2007). Engel's novel suggests that while empathy toward Indigenous people and animals can catalyze ethical action, it can also re-enact an extractivist ideology. In Lou's case, empathy causes her both to appropriate Indigeneity while exploiting access to resources unavailable to Indigenous people and to instrumentalize her own sexuality.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.092
Threshold uncertainty score0.184

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0220.032
Scholarly communication0.0060.003
Open science0.0010.007
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.261
Teacher spread0.245 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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