The cheapest police: the limits of recognition and intellectual freedom in Canadian libraries
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current debates within librarianship around intellectual freedom echo debates in broader society around free speech, cancel culture, and "culture war". This thesis argues that, far from being a transcendental value or purely intellectual concept, intellectual freedom is deeply implicated in political struggles over class, race, gender, and sexuality. Taking two recent controversies over the exclusion of trans and Indigenous people from Canadian libraries, this thesis links library policy and practice with longstanding tendencies within Canadian politics itself, in particular the hegemonic use of a form of communitarianism known as the politics of recognition. Once a pragmatic strategy to manage Canadian cultural and political demands of marginalized groups, in the 1990s the politics of recognition became a sophisticated political theory, one which informs Canadian politics (including the politics of libraries) to the present day. Applying a conjunctural analysis of the media, moral panics, and hegemony drawn from the work of Stuart Hall, this thesis offers a critique of Canadian politics and libraries as political institutions that focuses on three main areas: liberal individualism, bourgeois hegemony, and the politics of recognition which liberalism developed to neutralize the threat of radical difference. These interlocking strands paint a picture of Canadian libraries not as politically neutral organizations fostering individual freedom and unconstrained intellectual development, but as playing a specific role in the construction and maintenance of liberal hegemony which demonizes particular Others - like trans and Indigenous peoples - as part of a broader political strategy: the maintenance and survival of the liberal Canadian state itself. The concept of intellectual freedom in librarianship, in particular, can then more clearly be seen as a pragmatic tool in the service of the Canadian state's hegemonic strategy, rather than as a pure, timeless, apolitical concept.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| 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 it