Intrinsic Value in Transformative Politics and Practice: Interviews with Women in La Via Campesina
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this doctoral thesis I explore key aspects of a transformative politics and practice developing globally within grassroots social movements. I do so by looking at the activism of women in La Via Campesina – a global movement of small-and-medium scale food providers fighting for food sovereignty and agroecology. This qualitative study utilizes participant observation and interview methods. For almost two decades, I have been deeply engaged in movement activism, and, since 2007, participated in La Via Campesina in Canada and internationally. Between 2016 and 2021, I conducted interviews with nineteen women and one non-binary activist from thirteen countries, carrying out the research at four international meetings and conferences. I selected participants who share a politics that is deeply critical of relations of exploitation and oppression and based on far-reaching visions of life-affirming alternatives. Literatures from feminist, ecological, Marxist, anti-colonial and anti-racist scholars and activists inform my analysis of their activism. I found that these La Via Campesina participants emphasized a politics focused on building relationships. Relationships are at the heart of the participants’ practice in all areas of their lives – with their families, their communities, on the land and in their movements. Drawing on Joel Kovel (2007) as well as Indigenous worldviews and perspectives (Allen 1986, Armstrong 2014, Coulthard 2014, LaDuke 2020, TallBear 2019, The Red Nation 2021) I saw that the deep and defining focus on relationships that I found among all my participants is the manifestation of a politics grounded in intrinsic value. This study throws significant new light on both transformative politics and intrinsic value. In this time of crisis, when the commodification of everything is threatening the very existence of humanity, and many other species, this life-affirming politics is showing what is important and necessary to healing our world.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".