The social construction of a threatened species: a critical analysis of a polar bear discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent listing of the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) as 'threatened' under the United States Endangered Species Act occurred despite widespread debate about the validity of, and need for listing. In this thesis, I conduct a Critical Discourse Analysis on a prevalent discourse in the polar bear debate, that of the Center for Biological Diversity. I aim to denaturalize this discourse by addressing two key questions: How is this polar bear discourse constructed through texts? And, what are the broader discursive practices and sociocultural contexts supporting these texts? I find the Center for Biological Diversity's polar bear discourse is comprised of multiple constructs linked to broader discursive and sociocultural practices through four inextricably associated elements: a scientific, an ethical, a political and a metaphorical element. This discovery is of potential use to less powerful actors in the polar bear debate, like Inuit communities, because avenues may be created for critiquing dominant positions and for articulating their own.
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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 | 0.019 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".