The Trickster Thread: Using the Arts as a Tool for Individual and Social Transformation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The Trickster Thread: Using the Arts as a Tool for Individual and Social Transformation Sue Proctor Doctor of Philosophy (Individualized Program in Social Science) Concordia University, 2025 The history of Commedia dell’arte and the Trickster is centuries long. The archetype of Clown and Trickster continues in many shapes and forms (Green & Swan 1993; Holm 1998; Mawer 1932; McCormick 2010; Nye 2016; Towsen 1976; Proctor 2013). In the arts, through performing, teaching, working in healthcare and personal development as a clown, I have encountered and engaged with the Trickster. This thesis traces the thread of the Trickster through these multiple practices to realize what the Trickster might have to offer in the present day. Commedia and the Trickster (or Clown) have inspired much of my work, from the Manitoba Developmental Center (MDC) where the tools of Commedia and clowning were effective in facilitating creative drama with adults diagnosed with severe intellectual and physical disabilities, to my work with children and others through the Manitoba Artists in the Schools program (AIS), Manitoba Theatre for Young People (MTYP), the Arts Ability Project with the Canadian Centre on Disability Studies (CCDS) and presently with Arts Inclusion at the Crescent Arts Centre (CAC). The improvisation, mime, masks and puppetry from Commedia dell’arte followed me as did the sense of humour, play, reversal and paradox from the storytelling Trickster. Based on my personal journey, this thesis brings together aspects of this comedic practice in literature, performance and socially engaged arts to envision an approach that is able to revitalize arts process, practice and performance to make the arts more meaningful, accessible and inclusive to the public.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
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".