The Currency of Water in Words: An Analysis of the Conceptual Metaphors of Water
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is a study of water metaphors in the theoretical framework of feminist environmental humanities. It draws on feminist theory, metaphor theory, and Indigenous theories. It examines some of the water metaphors enshrined in Canadian legislation, specifically the Fisheries and Oceans Act and the Canada Water Act. It also examines some of the water metaphors in Canadian literature, focusing on creative works by Lisa Moore, Rita Wong, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. I argue that a dialogue between metaphor theory and feminist theory radically transforms the scope for understanding water in a way that not only consolidates the presence of materiality, but initiates a trajectory into the discursive and creative modes of metaphor that enable the interrogation of the politics of water. As a settler Canadian, I position this dialogue in relation to Richard W. Hill Sr. and Daniel Coleman’s metaphor of the Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty to frame the conversation between the Indigenous and settler Canadian texts that I examine in this dissertation. Following a reparative arc, I analyze the metaphors of water to reveal the discrepancy between some of the legislative and creative metaphors. I conclude that the analytical lens of metaphor contribute to a greater understanding of how the conceptual metaphors of water we employ reflect our embodied experience of water and how historically marginalized as well as new metaphors can shape our values and ideas about water in the Anthropocene. I also conclude that the theoretical intersection of water and metaphor constitutes a powerful foundation from which to reimagine metaphor’s shared materiality and efficacy with water. This study affirms the value of a cultural intervention in the praxis of the water issues of the Anthropocene.
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| 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".