Power from below: State-society relations and intersectional organizing in Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a province where the community sector has gained political recognition, yet where the government refuses to recognize the existence of systemic racism, this paper investigates how intersectional organizers in Montreal make sense of their institutional environment and strategize for emancipatory social change. Intersectional organizers are activists who adopt a systemic analysis of social inequality and its solutions and center the realities of intersectionally marginalized people in their organizing. Through thirteen in-depth interviews with Montreal-based intersectional organizers, this study identifies both the institutions that are salient to their work—the provincial funding regime for the community sector, the community sector’s concertation model and culture, and the media ecosystem—and explores the theories of change that shape how they build and deploy power in this context. The study highlights the democratic and relational practices these organizers adopt to build the power of their communities and resist the threat of institutionalization. In addition, contrary to both dominant political science accounts of social movements that target the state, and normative arguments that prone "turning away" from the state as a vehicle for liberation, this paper reveals the pragmatic vision intersectional organizers adopt, resisting binary either/or theories of change in favor of deploying power in cultural and community interventions as well as in the political (government) sphere. Finally, this paper illustrates how intersectional people power can be hindered by overlapping individual, organizational, and policy-level exclusions, which result in tremendous strain on organizers and undermine democratic political equality
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".