Seeking a Right to the City in Toronto: Youth, Pedagogy, Pandemic, and Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This drama-based ethnographic research study asks how youth in Toronto, Canada, negotiate a right to the city in these times of pandemic and climate crisis. It also examines the affordances of using drama-based methodologies to study Toronto youth’s right to the city. It engages with three online drama classrooms in the Toronto District School Board: one middle school (12-14 years old) and two high schools (14-18 years old). In these drama classrooms, auto-topography (Heddon, 2007) is mobilized as a methodological and pedagogical tool to engage the city as an oeuvre (Lefebvre, 1996) that integrates both physical and virtual space. Amin’s (2012) ‘urban feelings,’ Ahmed’s (2004/2014) ‘cultural politics of emotion’ and Massumi’s (2015) ‘politics of affect’ conceptually guide this study. ‘Diffracted reflexivity’ (Serra Undurraga, 2021) is adopted as an analytical approach that attends to the sensory and embodied qualities of the data, and the broader forces of power, history and identity in which they are entangled. The findings align with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1985) concept of ‘the minor’ in that the youth’s auto-topographical performances contest majoritarian narratives of belonging, exclusion, nature, culture, and participation in Toronto in these times. Auto-topography gestures to how emotional flows of shame, disgust, fear, nostalgia, longing and joy serve to ‘deterritorialize’ and ‘reterritorialize’ youth in the context of gentrification (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Auto-topography confronts the capitalist and anthropocentric city, enlivening the enchanted materialism (Bennett, 2001) and ‘ecological anthropomorphism’ (Woynarksi, 2015) of parks, libraries, valleys, animals, and streets. Further, ‘participation’ – as foundational to the formation of the urban citizen – is problematized amid the changing stakes of ‘trust’ and ‘risk’ during the COVID pandemic. Hospitality and intimacy emerge as concepts for advancing a right to the city that integrates the public and private spheres. The dissertation closes with a consideration of a ‘theatre of little changes’ (Balfour, 2009) for the conceiving of a right to the city via a politics of co-flourishing.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| 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".