Taking yoga off our mat: approaching Montreal's yoga culture with a critical lens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Yoga has evolved into a ‘booming' phenomenon, particularly in North America where over thirty million individuals are known to practice, making it a $27 billion industry. The modern form of yoga, as practiced in North America, has drifted away from its traditional roots in order to accommodate the needs, lifestyles, and cultural norms of North Americans. Traditionally, the main reason for practicing yoga is to attain "enlightenment," a way to discontinue the cycle of reincarnation. Modern yoga is now practiced for a diversity of reasons including stress reduction, mental wellness, fitness and weight loss, and in different settings such as prisons, schools, community centres, churches, shopping malls, parks, hospitals and corporate sectors. Although there has been quite a wide range of literature focusing on the philosophy and benefits of yoga, little academic attention focuses on critical reflection of the ways in which the yoga culture has become inaccessible to those who do not fit the dominant and stereotypical image of yoga: thin, flexible, white and wealthy. Data indicates that the dominant narrative in Montreal's yoga culture speaks to a small fraction of society and fails to represent the vibrant diversity in our city. With the use of critical autoethnography, critical ethnography, participatory photography and semi-structured interviews, I document how the intersection of race, class and body type impacts individual and collective yoga practices of seven yoga teachers and practitioners in Montreal. These individuals' shared testimonies and photographs provide a critical lens to understanding modern yoga culture and provides a more diverse and informed standpoint of yoga practitioners in Montreal.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".