Being Black and Outdoors: The Perception of the Wilderness in the Canadian Imagination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How are Black Canadians increasing their connecting to nature, via outdoor recreation? This is the key research question driving this dissertation. Attending to access to outdoor recreation as a social justice issue, the dissertation examines how it is fettered to power, and to historic and current social conditions that restrict Black access to nature. The complexity of Black people’s relationship to nature is explored through the research participants experiences of snowshoeing while Black, camping while Black, and hiking while Black. The dissertation’s theoretical foundation is built on Black geographies, social nature studies, and cultural studies scholarships. In the case of outdoor recreation, Black geographies offers new ways of interrogating the norms of the sector to expose their underlying racialization and spatiality. I used this foundation to develop an innovative research framework called ‘Black mobilities in nature’. As a qualitative research methodology, I use it to explore the perception of nature in the Black spatial imaginary; embodying blackness in nature; and ways of moving through nature as Black spatial mobility. Outdoor recreation is not just play – it is a main pathway into caring for the environment, and can increase a sense of belonging and citizenship. In the nationalist mythologies of Canada, it is the land of the Great Outdoors, the Great White North, and of We the North. Outdoor recreation is a rite of passage, and the ideal outdoor citizens are White. As outdoor recreation is place-based and built on Indigenous skills and technology, it opens questions on the Black relationship to the land. The Black presence in the Canadian wilderness, enjoying outdoor recreation, disrupts notions of purity and whiteness in the nation and on the land. The Black presence speaks back to geographies of resistance. It is a fugitive act in lives fashioned by living in the wake and the after-life of slavery. It is a counter-story to the relentless surveillance and its attempts to restrict access to nature. Being Black and outdoors is a celebration of Black agency and a practice of freedom.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.056 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".