Working in a space of contradictions: military culture change work in Canada
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
This article explores what we have learned about Critical Military Studies (CMS) from bringing a critical lens to culture change efforts within the Canadian military. Funded by the Department of National Defence (DND), from 2022 to 2025, we ran the Transforming Military Cultures (TMC) Network, comprised of Canadian and international academics, defence scientists, military members, and veterans with an interest in advancing military culture change. Critiquing and challenging the organization we were funded by was often contradictory and always complex work. In this article, we reflect on the social, political, and institutional context of our engagement with DND/CAF. We describe the unique risks, tensions, and possibilities that arose, including the backlash and silencing we experienced when publishing our work in the Canadian Military Journal. We argue that CMS scholarship requires us to navigate the ongoing dynamic of the military’s institutional commitment and resistance to culture change alongside growing political polarization. Our work has reinforced the importance of CMS’s call to work within spaces of contradiction rather than avoiding the complexities of engaged scholarship. While we encountered limitations and pushback as CMS scholars engaged with the military, we argue that there still is value in working in this space of contradictions. We conclude by reflecting on what our experiences reveal about the possibilities and limitations of CMS in this particular moment in time and location within North America.
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 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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