Diversity is (not) good enough: Unsettling White Settler Colonialism within Toronto's Queer Service Sector
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores the ways in which queer service provision and non-Indigenous lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and trans (LGBTQ)-identified service providers in downtown Toronto can contribute to and become complicit in white settler colonial projects. During this study based on in-depth interviews, forty-three research participants were asked about their experiences working within their respective queer service organizations, and, more specifically, about their understandings of how diversity, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism are practiced. Findings highlight how queer service provision, particularly its perpetual crisis and capacity to care for queerness, can obscure the ways the organizations themselves contribute to the naturalization of a hierarchy of oppression that centralizes the needs of white queers. Additionally, I consider the narratives of white service providers' goodness as easily relocating Indigenous peoples as "problems" and "pathology" who then become unworthy of care. Moreover, this inquiry theorizes how the narratives offered by white service providers fit Indigenous peoples and people of colour into stories of Canadian multiculturalism. I show how non-Indigenous queer and trans service providers' evocations of diversity and inclusion easily deflect their implicatedness in white settler colonialism. Although queer service provision is a rich site of queer politics, it continues to be a site that is tied to state-sanctioned funding regimes and neoliberal models of care used to naturalize Indigenous peoples' elimination, erasure, and assimilation. Thus, this research contends that queer communities in downtown Toronto operate to sustain white supremacy and settler colonialism. I conclude with a set of questions that asks non-Indigenous service providers to engage with how they participate (often unknowingly) in white settler colonial projects, and move beyond queer service provision as a site of emancipation in order to meaningfully support Indigenous resurgence and decolonization.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".