Mountain Biking and Trail Building: Capability Expansion, Relationships, and Social Change in the Contact Zone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The sport-for-development (SfD) field has grown in recent years, coming to be theorized, researched, and practiced from myriad disciplinary perspectives. Two of these perspectives, postcolonial thought and the Capability Approach, represent fruitful avenues for extending normative and evaluative aspects of research and practice. In this dissertation, I draw on the convergence of these two strands of thought to understand the role of sport, particularly the process of building mountain bike trails, in an Indigenous community development project in British Columbia. Using a relational perspective grounded in postcolonial theory, I used ethnographic methods and media analyses to engage with the process of trail building across two summer building seasons. Further, I used the Capability Approach to engage with ethnographic and interview data through the lens of a critical development perspective. To do so, mountain biking and outdoor recreation are located first, within the discursive and policy environments of settler colonial Canada, second, as a facilitator of intercultural and inter-community contact, and third, as a vehicle for expanding capabilities. The research suggests that outdoor recreation is positioned as an aspect of a contemporary settler economy, but that this does not preclude Indigenous communities from leveraging it in ways that can disrupt settler colonial structures in some ways. Within this socio-political milieu, the research shows that SfD projects that prioritize creating opportunities for creative expression, cultural values, and meaningful work may enhance the potential for sport to contribute to well-being.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".