‘Mixed feelings’ and emotional dissonance: how students navigate ritual and emotion in Canadian engineering culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer is a 100-year-old tradition in Canadian engineering, and the ‘iron ring’ is an emotionally resonant cultural symbol for many engineers. The ritual, its origins, and its place in engineering culture have been topics of recent public debate. In this paper, we analyse engineering students’ reflections on a classroom exercise that encouraged critical thinking around the ritual. Using Hochschild’s ‘feeling rules’ and framed by Durkheim and Collins’ conceptualizations of rituals, we identify collective understandings held by students about how one should feel about the ritual, as well as students’ emotional reactions to the classroom exercise. We find students shared strong collective understandings of the ritual but had a range of emotional responses to critical questions about it. We argue that this case demonstrates both the power of professional socialisation to establish feeling rules, and the prospects and challenges for individuals’ participation in (re)making them.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".