Commuters and community on Bell Island: an ethnography of ferry mobilities and social reproduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis draws on ethnographic fieldwork with commuting workers residing on Bell Island—a ferry-reliant community located in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. At the time of fieldwork in 2015, registered work commuters traveling daily from and to Bell Island comprised approximately one-fourth of the island’s population. The commute itself is multimodal, involving a five-kilometre ferry trip across a short stretch of ocean, as well as travel by road at either end of the ferry. This thesis was undertaken as part of a large team project called On the Move Partnership, researching employment-related geographical mobility in the Canadian context. In studying the work-related mobilities of Bell Island ferry commuters, this research engages with literature on social reproduction and considers individual, household, and community-level patterns of unpaid labour. This thesis used ethnographic fieldwork methods of participant observation, unstructured interviews, and semi-structured interviews with Bell Island residents. It analyses the ways commuters form ‘support networks’ with other ferry passengers, contribute meaningfully to their own households, as well as ‘help out’ across households and participate in island-wide volunteer work. As such, this research highlights the many ways in which Bell Island commuters support one another, reinforcing their island community and cementing a commitment to people and place amidst demanding off-island commuting practices. It is through these everyday activities of social reproduction that Bell Islanders are shaping and re-shaping their island community. By considering the unwaged labour patterns that are part of the daily work commute itself, this thesis ultimately asserts that commuting in the Bell Island context is also a form of work.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".