In-Between Images: Everyday Performance, Generational Succession, and the Shaping of Polonia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is an interpretive ethnography and autoethnography of how my interlocutors and I experience and perform the reality of migranthood as members of Polonia, the Polish migrant diaspora. I analyze how we imagine, devise, and perform the reality of living in-between spaces, places, and times using Julie Cruikshank’s lens that “life is lived like a story” and Lisa Stevenson’s “image as method.” I interpret lifeworld images that my interlocutors and I consider pertinent to our lives and Polonia, especially our memories and heritage, dreams of the future, and present experiences of generational succession between baby boomers and millennials. I combine self-interpretation of mystory with insights from analyzing fieldwork conducted with other Polish Canadians residing in Brant.\n\nDrawing from theory by Gregory L. Ulmer and Norman K. Denzin, I argue that, through everyday performance, our lives are simultaneously shaped by and contribute to shaping Polonia. That is, we perform our lifeworlds in ways that are in tandem and at odds with how we imagine them, individually and collectively. These performances then have affective potential to reinforce and alter our imaginaries and those of others.\n\nFurthermore, while there is a certain level of passing down of images through generational succession—as so-called Polonia heritage—these imagistic landscapes undergo substantial re-articulations as they succeed. As a result, I conclude that Polonia remains in the crisis stage of a Turnerian social drama as each generation seeks to shape Polonia in its image.\n\nI resolve the above insights by arguing that life is (not) lived like a story. Through everyday performance and generational succession, we are authors of our lifestories while simultaneously influencing the lifeworlds of others. Instead, this research reveals that my interlocutors and I live in-between images.\n\nThis research was conducted in Brantford, Ontario between January 2016 and March 2017 with 14 principal interlocutors—six millennials (in addition to myself) and six baby boomers (in addition to my mother)—who self-identify as either Polish or Polish Canadian. I also conducted participant observation and interviews with members of a Polonia cultural centre in Brantford.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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".