Between Here and There: on the Adaptation of mena/swana Diasporic Artists in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores how mena/swana diasporic artists in Canada adapt to western cultural, social, and political environments through their artistic practices. Drawing on the author’s curatorial projects and exhibitions Garden of Broken Shadows (Critical Distance Centre for Curators, 2023) and As We Move Away from the Sun (Allan Gardens, 2024), the article examines how diasporic artists negotiate belonging, land, and identity beyond tokenizing frameworks often imposed by Western institutions. Through close analysis of artworks by Lamis Haggag and Anahita Norouzi , the author argues that practices rooted in care, grief, and connection to the land can redefine immigrants’ adaptation as a reciprocal and ongoing process of reclamation rather than a linear form of integration. The article situates these curatorial projects within broader histories of funding, censorship, and the collapse of independent art spaces in the mena/swana region following the 2011 Arab Spring. It links these histories to the lived experiences of artists who continue to navigate the complexities of migration and postcolonial realities within Canada’s cultural landscape. By foregrounding indigenous and anticolonial perceptions of adaptation, the article proposes a curatorial approach and practice that resist institutional tokenization and reclaims diasporic narratives as spaces of healing, relation, and self-definition.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".