Kinship Networks, Climate Catastrophes, and Environmental Racism in Two Young Adult Dystopias: Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: From the vantage of a present where economically distressed and racially marginalized nuclear families already struggle to thrive, young adult dystopias Orleans by Sherri L. Smith (2013) and The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (2017) project that the nuclear kinship unit will succumb to impending climate catastrophes compounded by racist policy responses and be replaced by larger, mostly non-genealogical tribal kinship networks. To parse Smith and Dimaline’s contention that future family survival lies in returning to extended kinship units, this essay argues that new kinship studies within anthropology, which decenters the nuclear family as a universal norm and frames relatedness as an enacted practice, provides a crucial theoretical lens. Smith and Dimaline also critique the present fragility of nuclear families by invoking the histories of African American and Indigenous Canadian extended kinship networks, using these histories to envision new kinship ties grounded in shared ethnicity and cultural memory.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".