Part of the Club, Not of the Club: The Experiences of Racialized Women in Canadian Curling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the experiences of racialized women who participate in curling in Ontario, Canada. Drawing from eleven semi-structured interviews, I argue that racialized women are not simply underrepresented in sport but actively marginalized by oppressive systems of patriarchy, classism, and racism that are deeply entrenched in the culture and traditions of curling clubs. Using a Bourdieusian framework, my analysis demonstrates how curling participation and success are not determined solely by invested time or skill, but also by the unequal distribution of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital. I contend that curling participation requires substantial time and financial commitment. Next, I illustrate the invisible yet powerful nature of connections, explaining that entry into the sport is often contingent on having a connection to a curler, with intergenerational relationships offering early advantages. I analyze alcohol as a form of cultural capital, and the normalization of alcohol consumption through rituals and traditions—explaining how non-drinkers are consequently marginalized. Throughout my analysis, I consider the intersection of gender, race, class, age, and religion to shed light on the nuanced lived realities of racialized women in sport. Within participant stories, I identify discriminatory and exclusionary behaviours that undermine the competence, authority, and legitimacy of curlers who do not align with the dominance of whiteness and masculinity. Ultimately, this thesis aims to illustrate the social hierarchies that function to inhibit the participation and power of racialized women in curling. Thus, I advocate for transformative EDII measures grounded in anti-racism and anti-sexism focused on dismantling power imbalances and the redistribution of power.
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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.067 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 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".