A Case for Utopian Dreaming: Feminisms within Canadian Artist-Run Centres
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is motivated by a set of questions elaborated from a central query: What is a flourishing future? When applied to the state of artist-run centre culture, and specifically feminist identified artist-run centres, in Canada, questions that follow include, who gets to represent futurity? Whose futures count? How are artist-run centres and art communities transformed by the inclusions of Indigenous and Black futures and futurism? How and by whom is feminism defined in these spaces? How does white feminism get out of the way of a flourishing future, or how doesn’t it? Throughout, I return to the concept of utopia as method, as proposed by Ruth Levitas. At its core, Levitas’s method comprises three simple steps: state the problem, attempt an archaeological dig of the past to shed insight into how we reached the problem, and then—and this is the key part—we are asked to educate our desires. \nThis grounding in utopian methodology leads me to specifically ask: how can artist-run centres benefit most from incorporating intersectional feminism and anti-oppression work into their daily operations? To think through this question, I consider a selection of historically feminist artist-run centres, active during the second wave of feminism to the present, to understand how they advanced specific feminist agendas, and to evaluate what kind of impact state policy and state funding priorities had on these artist-run centres. These include Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA) in Winnipeg, Manitoba; Women in Focus Collective (WIF) in Vancouver, British Columbia; The Women’s Art Resource Centre (WARC) and the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) in Toronto, Ontario; Womanspirit in London, Ontario; and La Centrale and articule in Montréal, Québec.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".