'This Place Should (Not) Exist': An Ethnography of Shelter Workers and the In-Between
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation draws on twenty-one months of participant observation at The Salvation Army Gateway, a shelter for men in Toronto. It pays particular attention to the shelter’s thirty-two workers, to their efforts to be both “the best shelter in the city” and to “befriend the poor.” The story told here employs Victor and Edith Turner’s theory of liminality as both prompt and foil. The understanding of the liminal it employs and the rationale for deploying it in relation to the Gateway are the subject of Part I. Aspects of the liminal (in-between) stage/state have been paired with various aspects of shelter life – certain repertoires, objects, ideas. There are eighteen such pairings, each provoking a short, ethnographically driven chapter. The interplay between the shelter and the liminal is at times illuminating, ironic, even incomplete. The chapters are clustered according to four themes – also called the coefficients of life at the shelter: stuckedness, subjunctivity, immaturity, irony. These four are simultaneously plotted in such a way as to lead the reader deeper into Gateway life. Part II Stuckedness, discusses contexts that surround the Gateway and hold it in place. Part III Subjunctivity, enters the shelter by way of the workers’ own ideas, desires, and intentions for the way the Gateway operates, especially its friendliness. Part IV Immaturity, tells the story of any-given day at the Gateway in order to consider its ambient youthfulness, and the significance of such for the formation of alternative community there. Part V Irony, unpacks the irreconcilable ironies that the workers live with. Understanding the Gateway as liminal space offers opportunity to think about whether or not the shelter system ought to exist in a city like Toronto and how all of us are implicated in sustaining it. While this thesis tries to preserve some of the undecideability of such a question, it also seeks to complicate the notion that people ought always to leave shelters in favour of “housing” or having their “own home.” This dissertation ultimately offers “homefulness” as a better measure for what is and is not lacking among the so-called “homeless.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".