Talking religion : discursive construals of religious identity in rural Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is a discourse analytic investigation of the "social practice" (Fairc!ough & Wodak, 1997, p. 258) of "talking identity" (Hadden & Lester, 1978) - in particular, religious identity. It uses interview and group discussion data generated in the rural Canadian town of Claresholm to examine (i) how rural Canadians present themselves in terms of religion in "talk-in-interaction" (Schegloff, 1987, p. 207), and (ii) how religious discourses intersect with other public sphere discourses in such talk. Drawing on both Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) (Hester & Eglin, 1997c; Jayyusi, 1984; Lepper, 2000; Sacks, 1979, 1992, [1972] 1986; Scbegloff, 2007c) and stance analysis (Du Bois, 2007; Englebretson, 2007b; Jaffe, 2009; Kockelman, 2004), this case study shows that Claresholm residents produce a sense of their own religious identities both (i) directly, by categorizing themselves as "belonging to" and/or "separate from" specific religious groups, and (ii) indirectly, by projecting attitudinal stances on multiculturalism, as it relates to religion. This study also shows that attitudinal stance-taking on matters other than religion is one way in which interdiscursive links are forged between religious and other public sphere discourses, such as Canadian Multicultural Discourse (CMD). In doing so, this thesis posits that religious identity can fruitfully be conceptualized as a "transportable identity" (Zimmerman, 1998, pp. 90-91), accomplished (at least in part) in "talk-in-interaction" (Schegloff, 1987, p. 207) - and that close linguistic analysis is relevant to Religious Studies inquiries. It also argues that MCA and stance analysis are complementary analytical frameworks for investigating the discursive construal of religious identities. Finally, this thesis suggests that Claresholm residents' "quasi-private" and "semi-public" (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Liebhart, 1999, p. 187) talk about religion is partially shaped by the wider discursive context within which it is produced - and, on this basis, it argues for the admission of religious discourses into Canada's "multicultural public realm" (Parekh, 2000, p. 203).
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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".