"A Spirit of Disobedience": Black Women Freedom Runners and the Collective Practice of Abolition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research focuses on the geography of slavery and resistance in eighteenth-century Quebec. It aims both to understand the geographies of constraint, captivity, and violence, and to trace how Black women freedom runners moved through these geographies. I examine how multiple scales of isolation shaped the violence of slavery and analyse how manumission was used in Quebec to perpetuate and accentuate Black people’s isolation after their enslavement. Paying attention to the political realignments created by the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution, I demonstrate how Black women and white slaveowners understood Quebec’s geography of isolation as one in which the landscape could be used to create freedom or to reinforce captivity. I contend that Black women freedom runners both navigated and rearranged the legal geography of Quebec to gain their freedom. Indeed, I use “freedom runners” instead of “fugitives” to center the political project that Black people were running towards instead of the owners and institutions they were running from. This study is about looking into Black women’s freedom runs as a manifestation of their political acumen and their interjection into colonial and imperial politics. I contend that fissures in the political landscape were not coincidental or circumstantial, but rather inherent to the Black Atlantic. In other words, I use the term “fissures” to describe the routes that Black women freedom runners used for their escape, even though they were not intended for Black resistance or subversion. Rather than a total opening or a sudden move from unfreedom to freedom, then, enslaved Black women had to identify small veins in the landscape and in the law, subtle fissures that made movement and flight possible.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".