The Prefigurative and Settler-Colonial Politics of Relational Commons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an era of environmental degradation and social inequality, the concept of the ‘commons’ offers a framework for reimagining resource management through shared stewardship and collective care. This article, co-authored by an agrarian anthropologist and a guiding Mapuche Elder, examines the prefigurative politics of a Grower Activist Collective in Calgary, Canada, where critical urban gardening functions as both ecological care and political resistance. Using participatory methods, the study explores how everyday acts of sharing seeds, labour, and knowledge cultivate relationality as the foundation of communal solidarity. We argue that practices of seed saving, gift economies, participatory governance, and intercultural knowledge exchange enact alternative socio-political relations rooted in the commons, challenging capitalist enclosure and market-oriented food systems. Integrating intersectional and anti-colonial approaches, the research highlights how grassroots initiatives can transform food systems, foster mutual aid, and build resilience, contributing to broader struggles for social justice and environmental regeneration.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".