Borders, doors, and stories: situated histories of boycott divestment and sanctions (BDS) activism at McGill University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This thesis explores memories and new histories of student engagement in decolonial organizing during the South African anti-apartheid movement and Palestinian liberation movement. Using oral histories of participation in student activism in the 1980s and 2020s, with a focus on McGill University in Montréal, it seeks to construct new frameworks for considering the affective capacity of social movements that leverage positions within colonial institutions to effect change. Exploring the role of collective experience and memory formation through key moments in BDS history – the mid 1980s student campaigns that won divestment at most major universities and the 2024 wave of student encampments for Palestine -- it uses personal accounts in conversation with written and visual media to construct a history of BDS activism across temporal, geographical, and cause-based silos in history-writing. Pointing to new questions and considerations for the study of social movements, it uses these histories to interrogate the role of boundary-crossing forms of organisation that engage in contestation with imperial power structures, from the Western university to colonial occupations, and their implications for our understandings of the dynamics that shape the trajectories of decolonial student movements today.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".