Italian Canadian youth and the negotiation of identities: the discourse on italianita, language and the spaces of identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis analyzes the identity politics (Hall 1990) and multiple discourses of being and becoming Italian Canadian among second/third generation Italian Canadian youth in Toronto. Using Giddens (1991) terms centre and periphery, this thesis investigates, firstly, the Italian Canadian/Italian centre(s)' various contradictory discourses on italianita (i.e., representations of italianness), definitions of the "right" forms of cultural and linguistic capital (Bourdieu 1977), and who can legitimately claim to be and become the "right" Italian Canadian. These local and transnational discourses produced across the Italian Canadian/Italian centre(s) define italianita and its spaces. The analysis shows how those dominating the Italian Canadian/Italian centre(s) essentialize italianita, use linguistic and cultural capital (i.e., Standard Italian, Italian culture and representations of present-day Italy) as a way of controlling who is included and excluded from the Italian Canadian/Italian worlds. Along the periphery, Italian Canadian groups reproduce and contest centre-discourses in order to redefine italianita and its spaces. Italian Canadian youth manoeuvre for access to forms of linguistic and cultural capital and positionings as legitimate possessors of such capital in order to tap into symbolic and material resources and the spaces of italianita across multiple worlds. Secondly, this thesis investigates those along the periphery: Italian Canadian youth organizations and other groups, and specifically how eight second/third generation Italian Canadian youths manage, negotiate and challenge identities (e.g., ethnicity, language, religion, gender and sexuality) through the discourses on self-identification, language, culture and italianita across and within discourse sites (e.g., home, university campus, university Italian language classrooms, peer group social sites and workplace) and multiple worlds (i.e., Italian Canadian, Canadian and Italian). In sum, this research uncovers the tensions and contradictions of what it means to be and become Italian Canadian across a multi-generational immigrant community that is undergoing change and re-analysis within a globalizing world. Critical ethnography and multiple field methods were used to explore the politics of identity. The data was analyzed using discourse analysis (Chouliaraki Fairclough 1999), focusing on the discourse on language, culture and the representations of italianita and primarily examining content with references made to linguistic practices when they revealed social positionings.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| 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".