Sustainability and rural communities in the age of globalization: Can we learn our way out?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is an investigation of sustainability and rural communities in the age of globalization. It begins by outlining the economic, political, social, environmental, gender-based and cultural impacts of corporate globalization on rural communities. This thesis then builds a theoretical model, using concepts from three theorists: Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, Ju?rgen Habermas' concept of communicative action and John McMurtry's concept of life values. Using this model, it analyzes current understandings of sustainability in the literature and finds them inadequate to deal with the devastating impacts of corporate globalization on rural communities. Moving from theory to metatheory, it investigates the ability of the theoretical model to contribute to a critical understanding of sustainability. Then using the theoretical model as a foundation, this thesis develops a critical understanding of sustainability as a set of structures and processes that build the civil commons. The civil commons is society's organized and community-funded capacity to provide universally accessible resources that maintain or increase the well-being of individuals and communities. Universal health care, parks, public education, old age pensions and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms are all examples of the conscious and co-operative human agency of the civil commons in Canada. Given this critical understanding of sustainability, this thesis then asks whether we can learn our way out of our current unsustainable state and learn our way into sustainability. It argues that we can, proposing a new concept called sustainable learning, based on the theoretical model and grounded in emancipatory learning, social learning and transformative learning. This thesis then puts forward a new research agenda, applying the critical understanding of sustainability to two familiar concepts: sustainable development and sustainable rural communities. It concludes with a new concept, sustainable globalization, based on a critical understanding of sustainability.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 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".