The Role of Emotions in Ontological Conflicts : A Case Study of the Territorial Conflict Between the State of British Columbia, Coastal GasLink, and the Wet’suwe’ten
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For almost two decades, Coastal GasLink, with the support of the State of British Columbia (B.C.), Canada, has sought to build a hydrofracking gas pipeline, which would cross a large part of Wet’suwet’en Nation’s territories. Faced with this, the different clans that make up the Nation, under the governance system of the Hereditary Chiefs, have expressed their disagreement, demonstrating that the environmental assessment and decision-making processes overlooked their deep relationship with the Yintakh (their territory). Drawing on a methodological approach that involved visual ethnography and combined content and narrative analysis, my research aims to analyze the role that emotions play in the territorial-ontological conflict between the State of B.C., Coastal GasLink, and the Wet’suwet’en. The combination of content and narrative analysis helped decipher and understand how people express everyday practices and construct and perform their identity amid the conflict. In facing COVID-19 pandemic limitations, visual ethnography provided an alternative to fieldwork. Using online available audiovisual material, through which I was able to keep a phenomenological approach, I used my senses (visual and auditory) to analyze body movements, tone of voice, and language. The theoretical approach to the conflict was from that of political ontology and emotional political ecologies (EmPEs). To answer my first research question: how is the conflict of interest an ontological conflict? I articulate a framework made up of Ingold’s phenomenology, Blaser’s ontological conflicts, and Escobar's studies of culture as a radical difference. To answer my second research question: what is the role that emotions play in the conflict? I build on the spiderweb, a metaphor developed by Ingold, to expand the scope of González-Hidalgo’s emotional political ecologies. I demonstrate that the processes of political inter-subjectivation sought at the Unist’ot’en Healing Center help understand, on the one hand, the worry, frustration, and stress of the Wet'suwet'ens facing the world-creating practices of Coastal GasLink and the State of B.C. On the other hand, the Healing Center reveals how the affections for the other-than-human and their relational world inform Wet’suwet’en resistance. Lastly, I unveil how Coastal GasLink and the Ministry of Aboriginal Rights and Reconciliation, through discourses and practices of inclusion and gender equality, seek to blur radical cultural differences, delegitimize the Wet’suwet’en pre-colonial governance system, and create affections for the Western-modern world.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| 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".