The uncanny doubling of sovereign and citizen: anti-state narrativity in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last decade, Alberta, Canada has been the site of several highly publicized events focused on individuals labelled as “sovereign citizens”. From the occupation of homes and traplines claimed as sovereign territories (CBC 2013a, 2013b) to larger than life court cases with wide public audiences (Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571), sovereign citizens capture the Albertan imagination with their unusual beliefs and practices. Asserting discourses of freedom, liberty, and self-governance, these individuals surface at the junctures of everyday life, challenging state authority through obscure and obtuse interpretations of law. Whether they appear through hegemonic state classificatory schemes used by the media, in stories narrated by Albertans trying to understand the movement, or in legal courts, sovereign citizens are entangled with the worlds they seek to reject. A doubling—the sovereign and the citizen—thus emerges and remerges as individuals challenge the state and its assumed duties, laws, and expectations, all the while they move, transgress, or realign themselves in relationship to the state.Drawing on four months of ethnographic fieldwork between May to September 2018, this thesis thus explores the relationship between sovereign citizens as an elusive and slippery category and Albertans, asking: how do sovereign citizens and Albertan citizens narrate their own (and others’) challenges to the Albertan state
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".