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Canadian Jewish authors and their work to be recognized at York on Oct. 27

books literacy
A stack of books

Eight outstanding books and their authors will be celebrated on Oct. 27 when York University once again hosts the the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards.

The awards, which recognize and reward the finest Canadian Jewish writing, are celebrating their fifth year of recognizing outstanding literary achievements.

Winners have been announced in eight categories, including: fiction, memoir, biography, history, scholarship, Holocaust literature, Yiddish, and books for children and youth.

The awards ceremony will be held at 2 p.m. in the Tribute Communities Recital Hall, Accolade East Building, Keele Campus. All are welcome and admission is free. Authors will read from their works and a reception will follow with a meet-the-author and book signing event. The award-winning books will be available for purchase.

Award winners 2019

Fiction
Jennifer Robson for The Gown: A Novel of the Royal Wedding (HarperCollins)
This is an enthralling historical novel about one of the most famous wedding dresses of the 20th century – Princess Elizabeth’s wedding gown – and the embroiderers who made it. Told through the eyes of three women, one of them a Holocaust survivor, The Gown is a story of rebuilding friendship and family after the devastation of the Holocaust.

Memoir
Ayelet Tsabari for The Art of Leaving (HarperCollins)
An intimate collection of essays, the book documents Tsabari’s travels around the world as she searches for her identity. As an Israeli of Yemeni descent in a country sometimes seen as devaluing her cultural traditions, Tsabari searches for a sense of belonging as she drifts from Thailand to India to Vancouver and Toronto before she rediscovers her heritage and embraces her family history.

Biography
Alexandra Popoff for Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (Yale University Press)
A well-researched book that introduces, or reintroduces, readers to a significant writer whose stand against totalitarian ideology has taken on new relevance and urgency. Grossman’s epic novel, Life and Fate, was the first Soviet work to equate Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, pairing Stalinist anti-Semitism with Hitler’s campaign to annihilate the Jews. Popoff grippingly captures the stories behind Grossman’s stories, particularly of censors’ efforts to alter and limit them.

History
Matti Friedman for Spies of No Country: Behind Enemy Lines at the Birth of the Israeli Secret Service (Signal/McClelland & Stewart)
Canadian-Israeli journalist Matti Friedman introduces us to four unknown young Mizrahi Jews who became the nucleus of Israel’s nascent intelligence service. The tiny, amateur unit known as the “Arab Section” consisted of Jews from Arab countries who could pass as Arabs, thus allowing them to go undercover to gather intelligence, carry out sabotage and commit assassinations. More than a spy story, it sheds light on the complex nature of Israel – a country that many see as European, but where more than half of the population has Middle Eastern and North African roots and relates more to its Middle Eastern  neighbours.

Children/Youth
Anne Dublin for A Cage Without Bars (Second Story Press)
Dublin tells the story of Joseph and his younger sister Gracia who, along with hundreds of Jewish children, are abducted and sold into slavery in 1493 after the expulsion from Spain. They are shipped to the island of São Tomé, off the west coast of Africa, where they are forced to work on a sugar plantation under brutal conditions. Dublin recounts the horrors faced by these children in a way that is appropriate for her audience of young readers. This coming-of-age tale, filled with adventure, captures a little-known moment in Jewish history and fills a gap in historical fiction for young adults.

Yiddish
Chava Rosenfarb for Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Rosenfarb is one of the most celebrated Yiddish novelists who survived the Holocaust and settled in Montreal. Newly translated by her daughter, Goldie Morgentaler, these 13 essays offer personal accounts of a childhood imbued with Yiddish. They chronicle her experiences before and during the Holocaust as she strives to preserve the Yiddish literary canon from destruction by the Nazis. Later essays showcase the vibrancy of the post-Holocaust Yiddish literary milieu in Montreal. This collection marks the first time that Rosenfarb’s non-fiction essays have been presented together in English.

Scholarship
Michael Kater for Culture in Nazi Germany (Yale University Press)
This book, by a distinguished research professor emeritus of history at York University, examines the fate of the arts under Nazi rule. Modernism in music, expressionism in film, and the Bauhaus in architecture were all manifestations of the arts and culture of Germany’s Weimar Republic before the Nazis came to power. For the Nazis, the arts were only useful as political propaganda. They attacked the artistic movements that they felt were dominated by the Jews and leftist groups. Kater’s book examines how cultural life, including architecture, journalism, film, music, opera, theatre and the visual arts, became the means to control the minds of the people and the fate of the Jewish artists caught up in the social madness.

Holocaust
Leonard and Edith Ehrlich, Carl S. Ehrlich, editor, for Choices Under Duress of the Holocaust: Benjamin Murmelstein and the Fate of Viennese Jewry Volume I: Vienna (Texas Tech University Press)
A culmination of more than three decades of research by Leonard and Edith Ehrlich, and edited by their son, Carl S. Ehrlich, director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, it chronicles the harrowing decisions Jewish communal leaders in Austria were forced to make while under Nazi occupation. It examines the decision-making process from both a historical and a philosophical perspective and investigates the actions of the controversial Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, who was leader of the Jewish community of Vienna between 1938 and 1942, and later Judenältester (Chief Jewish Elder) of Theresienstadt concentration camp-ghetto.

The Canadian Jewish Literary Awards are hosted and sponsored by the Israel & Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University.

The Canadian Jewish Literary Awards jury for 2019:

  • Edward Trapunski – Chair, author of three books and winner of an ACTRA award as best writer;
  • Rona Arato – award-winning children’s book author and author of 15 books;
  • Alain Goldschläger – director of the Holocaust Literature Research Institute, professor of French at Western University, and former Chair of the National Task Force for Holocaust Education, Remembrance & Research;
  • Sara Horowitz – professor of comparative literature and Jewish studies at York University, former director of the Golda & lsrael Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies and former president of the Association for Jewish Studies;
  • Andrea Knight – editor and former co-publisher of the New Jewish Press, the publishing program of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto, and former managing editor of the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs; and
  • Michael Posner – award-winning author and playwright and former reporter for the Globe and Mail

To register for the awards ceremony, visit eventbrite.ca/e/canadian-jewish-literary-awards-2019-tickets-72744527841. For more information, visit cjlawards.ca.

Musician and author Tanya Tagaq gives moving performance

Book cover

On Oct. 1, the 2019-20 Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series presented renowned musician and author Tanya Tagaq. York University Teaching Assistant Dana Patrascu-Kingsley sent the following report to YFile.

Musician and author Tanya Tagaq visited York University on Oct. 1 to talk about her Giller Prize-nominated book, Split Tooth, as part of the Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series. During her visit, she gave a moving performance that included Inuit throat singing and reading from Split Tooth.

The book started as a diary that Tagaq wrote for herself. Most of it was written over the past 15 to 20 years, though some of the pieces are over 30 years old. Tagaq said that she sees putting her work out as “an act of resilience.”

According to the publisher, Penguin Random House Canada, in Split Tooth, “Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.” In it, mythological storylines intertwine with real events.

The book combines poetry and prose, and Tagaq spoke about the relationship she sees between the two: “I’m very interested in sound and the ideas that sound can make…. Because I work with sound, poetry and prose don’t make a difference to me. It’s all cadence.”

Craig Davidson will be the next featured speaker in the Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series, on Oct. 22, talking about his book The Saturday Night Ghost Club.

Readings are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Professor Leslie Sanders at leslie@yorku.ca or Professor Gail Vanstone at gailv@yorku.ca. All readings are held on Tuesdays from 7 to 9 p.m. in 206 Accolade West Building, Keele Campus.

Poet Dionne Brand to deliver keynote talk at event celebrating 20 years of Canadian Writers in Person

Dionne Brand

This year, Canadian Writers in Person celebrates its 20th anniversary with a special guest talk titled “What does writing do.” led by Canadian author, poet and activist Dionne Brand.

Dionne Brand.
Photo by Jason Chow

York University students, faculty and staff are invited to attend this anniversary event, which is presented by the Hal Jackman Foundation. The lecture will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. in the Sandra Faire & Ivan Fecan Theatre on York University’s Keele Campus. There will be a reception following the event. Organizers request that those interested in attending RSVP.

Brand is one of Canada’s most accomplished authors. Through poems, essays, documentaries, fiction and non-fiction, Brand’s work inspires audiences with its fearless exploration of important topics such as gender, political power, sexuality, feminism and race. Her writing has earned multiple honours, including the Governor General’s Award for poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Trillium Prize for literature, the Pat Lowther Award for poetry, the Harbourfront Festival Prize, the Toronto Book Award, book selections in the New York Times and the LA Times, among many other accolades.

“Canadian Writers in Person is a fantastic program,” said Brand, “[It is] a unique opportunity that brings writers in Canada together with their present and future audience.”

Humanities professors and Canadian Writers in Person event co-ordinators Gail Vanstone and Leslie Sanders echo Brand’s sentiments, describing the evolution of the program since its introduction in 1999 by York University English Professor John Unrau.

“York was one of the first Canadian universities to offer a course in Canadian literature, and Canadian Writers in Person has carried on that tradition,” said Vanstone. “We are also a free public reading series to those interested in state-of-the-art Canadian literature in the GTA and beyond.”

Canadian Writers in Person celebrates culture and diversity, and the program typifies some of the goals set by York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS). The series is now available as both a Culture & Expression course in the Department of Humanities in LA&PS and a public reading series that all members of the community are encouraged to attend.

“Canadian Writers in Person is a one-of-a-kind event that offers a unique and immersive experience for all,” said LA&PS Interim Dean J.J. McMurtry. “Our Faculty is so proud to support this endeavour. Twenty years is an incredible milestone.”

McLaughlin’s Common Read Workshop addresses concerns of first-year students, Oct. 23

A group of people walking outside
Professor Thomas Klassen
Thomas Klassen

The second event in McLaughlin College’s Common Read Workshop series, “Mastering Tests, Essays and Note-taking,” will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 23 from 12 to 1:30 p.m. in 140 McLaughlin College.

For the start of this academic year, all first-year students entering programs in McLaughlin’s affiliated units (politics; public policy and administration; sociology; and social science) were asked to do a “common read.” The book selected was Thomas R. Klassen and John A. Dwyer’s How to Succeed at University (And Get a Great Job!): Mastering the Critical Skills you Need for School, Work, and Life (UBC Press, 2015). This highly acclaimed book, designed to assist first-year university students in acquiring the academic skills necessary to excel in their post-secondary studies, was written by two of York University’s leading professors in the field of student growth and development.

First-year students were then invited to attend a matriculation and common read workshop held on Sept. 4, the first day of classes, intended to welcome them formally to McLaughlin College and discuss their common read. At this special event, students met the head of the college and one of the authors of the book, Klassen, who is professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, as well as a number of student leaders. Klassen introduced his book to the students and took them through various exercises to engage them in its substantive contents.

“When some of our first-year students receive feedback on their first assignments, they realize how different their high-school experience was from what is expected of them at university,” said Klassen, who leads the workshop series. “The common read series of workshops is intended to help students at key points throughout their all-important first year of university studies.”

The common read has been recognized as a high-impact educational practice by the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AACU). It is widely used throughout the world, especially in the United States, and best practices have emerged as to how it should be applied as part of the first-year student’s transition to university. Those best practices have been applied at McLaughlin College.

Here’s a look at the rest of McLaughlin’s Common Read Workshop lineup for this academic year:

Jan. 8, 2020: “Skills for success at university, work and life”

Feb. 12, 2020: “Practical problem solving and strengthening critical skills”

All sessions will be held from noon to 1:30 p.m. in 140 McLaughlin College. Everyone is welcome to attend and light refreshments will be provided.

The Common Read Workshop Series is hosted by the Office of the College Head, McLaughlin College. For more information, contact Vicky Carnevale at ext. 33824 or vcarneva@yorku.ca.

Book launch, exhibition opening celebrates work of Prof. Amar Wahab

A new book by Amar Wahab, associate professor of gender and sexuality in the School of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies at York University, will be celebrated at a book launch and accompanying exhibition opening on Oct. 24.

The event will take place from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Canadian Language Museum in the Glendon Gallery on York’s Glendon Campus. Remarks by Wahab, the author and artist, will begin at 6:30 p.m.

Image result for amar wahab york
Amar Wahab

Despite an abundance of research on enslaved labour systems, there is an alarming paucity of research on indentured labour systems in the colonial Caribbean.

The exhibition Coolie Hauntings aims to address this resonating silence. It presents images and installations featured in the recently published monograph Disciplining Coolies: An Archival Footprint of Trinidad 1846 (Peter Lang Publishers, 2019).

The work critically investigates the violence of the British indentureship scheme – an experiment with contracted and trafficked Indian migrant labour in the immediate aftermath of the abolition of slavery – in the 19th-century colonial Caribbean. It critically and creatively engages with the transcripts of a British inquiry (in 1846, the very first year of the labour scheme) into the torture, misery and death of Indian indentured labourers, or “coolies,” as they were referred to in official colonial discourse.

The exhibition reflects on the question: How do we creatively reimagine the productive presences and voices of ghosts in the coolie archive? It offers a creative “archival ethnography” to think about questions around coolie transience (as “bonded migrant”) and the invisibility/visibility of absented presences in the official record by offering a visual language of the dead.

The exhibit appears the embodied coolie as a ghostly figure who hovers over and under history from a certain disruptive positionality and therefore performs a strategic fetishism of (post)colonial power relations. In doing so, it contemplates the “ghost world” of indentureship as a counter-archive of labour migration that haunts official knowledge through a language of haunting.

The event is sponsored by the Canadian Language Museum, the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies Events Fund, the Office of the Vie-President Research & Innovation, the Centre for Feminist Research, and the School of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies.

Geography prof’s articles most cited and most read in world’s leading science and technology studies journal

Kean Birch
Kean Birch
Kean Birch

It’s a rare achievement to have the most cited or the most read article in an academic journal; having both at the same time with different papers is an almost unheard-of achievement in a discipline.

But that’s exactly what York University Professor Kean Birch has achieved. Birch is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and the current graduate program director of the Graduate Program in Science & Technology Studies (STS). In August, two of his papers were the most cited and the most read articles in the world’s leading science and technology studies journal, Science, Technology, & Human Values. Both papers are open access.

The most cited paper is a 2017 article titled “Rethinking Value in the Bio-economy: Finance, Assetization, and the Management of Value.” It draws on research funded by the York University Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies’ Minor Research Grant and outlines the new concept of “assetization” for understanding how things like scientific knowledge are transformed into capitalizable assets. Its groundbreaking nature is evident in the way its arguments have been taken up and cited across a range of social science disciplines, and from the fact that it has been downloaded more than 5,000 times to date.

In following up on this achievement, Birch and his collaborator Fabian Muniesa, a senior researcher at the École des Mines de Paris in France, have a new edited book coming out from MIT Press next year called Turning Things into Assets in which contributors analyze how knowledge, nature, infrastructure and social relations are all assetized. For example, York University Associate Professor James Williams from the Department of Social Science has a chapter in the book on social impact bonds.

The most read paper is a 2019 article titled “Technoscience Rent: Toward a Theory of Rentiership for Technoscientific Capitalism,” which has already been downloaded nearly 2,000 times since being published online in February of this year. It builds on the earlier 2017 paper by outlining a theory of “rentiership” for understanding the resurgence of monopolies and rent-seeking in contemporary, technoscientific capitalism. As such, it highlights the critical need to examine the relationship between technology and society.

The article represents the theoretical starting point for a $270,000 Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council Insight Grant that Birch received in 2018, and that he outlined in an invited lecture at a 2018 conference jointly organized by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research to mark the birthday of Karl Marx. See a video of his talk here.

Birch was pleasantly surprised by the two achievements. “I was keeping an eye on the downloads of my paper on rentiership to see how much interest there was in it, but I didn’t expect it to end up as the most read article in the journal,” he said. “It just shows how much interest there is in the relationship between technology and society.”

Prof. Hassan Qudrat-Ullah publishes book on testing effectiveness of decision-aiding technologies

FEATURED image Book Launch

A new book on improving human decision making and performance in complex, dynamic tasks is the result of research conducted by York University Professor Hassan Qudrat-Ullah.

Qudrat-Ullah, who teaches in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies’ School of Administrative Studies, demonstrates the utility of laboratory-based experimental methods in dealing with dynamic tasks in his book Improving Human Performance in Dynamic Tasks.

Image result for Improving Human Performance in Dynamic TasksThe book features a comprehensive evaluation model for testing the effectiveness of decision-aiding technologies and provides evidence as to the cost-benefit approaches to decision making, proving more effort is needed to improve human performance in dynamic tasks.

The defining characteristics of a dynamic decision task are that there are a number of decisions required, that decisions are interdependent, and that the environment in which the decision is made is transient and feedback is pervasive. Examples of dynamic tasks include the sustainable management of renewable resources and how businesses might allocate resources for research and development projects.

Improving human performance in complex, dynamic tasks has always been at the forefront of both research and practice of organizational decision making, and simulation-based education and training is a multibillion-dollar industry. The purpose of this book, says Qudrat-Ullah, is to provide the reader with knowledge about the design, development, validation and application of an innovative, system dynamics-based interactive learning environment that includes a systematic debriefing.

A laboratory experiment is reported in which the participants managed a dynamic task by playing the roles of fishing fleet managers. A comprehensive model consisting of the following five evaluation criteria is developed and used: task performance, decision strategy, decision time, structural knowledge and heuristics knowledge.

The key insights gleaned from the empirical data include the following:

  • The process-oriented debriefing improves subjects’ performance better than the outcome-oriented debriefing.
  • Contrary to the cost-benefit approach to decision making, more systematic effort is needed to perform better in dynamic tasks.

In the quest for innovative solutions for the education and training of people in dynamic tasks, the book outlines many challenges that lie ahead. Specifically, as we move towards displacing the traditional thinking that people perform poorly in dynamic tasks, founded in dominant dynamic decision-making literature, to one where plural logics of “systematic debriefing-based training with SDILEs” coexist under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, the need for systematic and integrated solutions for improving human performance in dynamic tasks becomes pronounced.

The goal was to focus attention on the whole virtuous cycle of expertise development: decision making to learning to decision making.

This book aims to stimulate a new way of thinking as a proclamation of a new era of resource constraints and a renewed focus on integrative solutions for people’s education and training in dynamic tasks.

New College invites York community to 10th anniversary celebration

New College, one of York University’s nine colleges, will celebrate its 10th anniversary on Oct. 10. The special event will include an evening of music, appetizers, and a chance to mix and mingle with faculty, staff, students, alumni and campus partners.

New College was formed in 2009, when York University launched the new Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS), combining the strengths of the former Atkinson Faculty of Liberal & Professional Studies and the Faculty of Arts.

The 10th anniversary event will include staff and faculty from past and present, including:

  • J.J. McMurtry, interim dean of LA&PS;
  • Lucy Fromowitz, vice-provost students;
  • Carol McAulay, vice-president finance and administration;
  • Gary Spraakman, former master of New College;
  • Marie-Helénè Budworth, former master of New College;
  • Christian Marjollet, former head of New College; and
  • Vanessa Pichelli, alumna.

As part of the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, New College serves students in Administrative Studies (BCom), Information Technology (ITEC), Human Resource Management (HRM), and Disaster & Emergency Management (DEM).

This free event is open to all members of the York community. Light refreshments will be provided. To register, visit yorku.ca/newcol/forms/view.php?id=130.

The event takes place from 5 to 8 p.m. in the Harry Crowe Room, 109 Atkinson Building.

Professor and graduate student receive top award for their paper exploring investor behaviour and stock returns

Andrei Semenov and Oriana Rahman

Recently, Andrei Semenov, an associate professor in the Department of Economics in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, and Oriana Rahman, an economics PhD student in the Faculty of Graduate Studies, received the Ben Graham Center for Value Investing Award from the Ivey Business School at Western University, London, Ont., for the best paper in areas related to asset pricing, market anomalies and behavioral finance presented at the 26th Annual Conference of the Multinational Finance Society in Jerusalem. 

Andrei Semenov (left), an associate professor in the Department of Economics in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, with Oriana Rahman, an economics PhD student in the Faculty of Graduate Studies

The efficient-market theory claims that asset prices fully and correctly reflect all available information, so that any future price changes are determined entirely by future news. However, many recent papers provide empirical evidence that market frictions can make the returns on individual stocks predictable (based on the return history) to some degree.  

In their paper titled “Investor behavior and stock returns,” Semenov and Rahman argue that, apart from the factors that can cause the predictability of stock returns, there might also be factors that have an opposite effect and weaken the influence of past returns on the current stock return.  

They investigate the impact of the anomalies in the investor’s behavior on the investor’s ability to forecast the returns on individual stocks and provide empirical evidence that taking into consideration the irrationality of investors can outweigh the effect of market frictions, thereby making the returns on individual stocks unpredictable based on past returns. 

‘Any idea we had about privacy is over,’ says author of new book on genealogy

Molecule of DNA forming inside the test tube equipment

Genealogy is a white-hot topic, an endless data mining project and a very lucrative business. Three years ago, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies Professor Julia Creet produced and directed Data Mining the Deceased, a TVO documentary that has now been seen by over half a million people and is streaming on demand in Canada, the U.K., the U.S., India and Australia.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada called it “one of the best projects we have funded.” Indeed, Creet’s research is well poised to inform policy-makers’ decisions around how to regulate this seemingly unregulatable area of technological development.

Today, the 2019 recipient of the President’s Research Impact Award is on the eve of releasing a book that’s a companion piece to the film. The Genealogical Sublime will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in February 2020. Funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, it traces the histories of the largest, longest-running, most lucrative and most rapidly growing genealogical databases.

Creet sits down with Brainstorm to discuss her highly anticipated new book.

Julia Creet and the cover of her upcoming publication. Image reproduced with the permission of the University of Massachusetts Press

Q: Did one thing spark your interest in genealogy and databases?

The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš. Source: Wikipedia

A: Yes. Yugoslav author Danilo Kiš wrote a book of short stories, Encyclopedia of the Dead, in the 1980s. One of the stories, a great gothic piece, provoked my interest. The story is about an encyclopedia that was penned by unknown, all-seeing historians and buried in a tomb beneath the Royal Library of Sweden in Oslo. It contained a book, or entry, for every ordinary person who had ever lived since 1789. The entirety of their lives had been captured, every detail. The story’s narrator finds herself in the tomb after her father’s death. Here, all of the books in the encyclopedia are chained to the stacks. The implication is that these histories, these lives, are the possession of the archives.

After Kiš published the book, he discovered, through a newspaper article, that his story was real. The Mormon Archives in Salt Lake City maintain such records. In the second edition of The Encyclopedia of the Dead, Kiš notes this fact in a long footnote. This footnote drew me to the Mormon Archives, of which I was unaware at the time. This was motivation for both my documentary and The Genealogical Sublime.

“At York, we’re very good at recognizing talent that doesn’t fit into conventional disciplines.” – Julia Creet

Q: The book evolved from the documentary?

A:  I had way more research than I could fit into the documentary. So, I had the material, and I developed the thesis: I wanted to write about the most complete, the largest genealogical databases in the world. They all aspire for an uncanny completeness, which is exactly what Kiš’s story was about. We all are, for some reason, yearning for a complete record of the dead.

Q: What were the case studies, and why were they selected?

A: I started with Confucius, whose descendants created the oldest recorded genealogy in the world – 184 generations. This genealogy is 2,500 years old.

The next one is the Mormon Database, the largest database in the world. The Mormons have already accumulated a quarter of the records. Their goal is to get all of the genealogical records in the world to trace the family of man back to Adam and Eve. It’s a mammoth project.

The next one is Ancestry.com because it’s the biggest. It was started by Mormon entrepreneurs. The Mormon Church backs the entire industry indirectly.

Confucius’s descendants created the oldest recorded genealogy in the world – 184 generations

Then I looked at the Iceland genealogical records because theirs is the most complete of any nation and also because it was funded by a pharmaceutical company, DeCode Genetics, that wanted to marry the genealogical records with genetic histories for the genetic marking of diseases. That’s the most concerning. The power of melding genealogic information with genetic information is that it gives you family histories and disease profiles.

DeCode paid for the database in Iceland to be constructed, creating new privacy issues. So, you see, every database has a different motivation behind it, and different problems and implications.

Q: What’s the state of regulation? What’s the danger of being unregulated?

A: There are very few regulations in Canada and the U.S. around the collection of, use of and access to this information. The industry is basically self regulating. Europe has much stricter regulations; France has banned consumer DNA tests.

There are very few regulations around this industry, says Creet

The dangers? All of the information is being sold to the pharmaceutical industry. Ancestry.com is selling it to Google-owned Calico, an American biotech company. 23andMe is pretty much Google-owned. There’s also MyHeritage and Helix. So, there are four or five big databases, none of them regulated, with varying degrees of privacy.

Of course, everyone’s worried about the insurance industry, which would love to get its hands on these databases. Canada has a genetic anti-discrimination law that says you can’t be discriminated against based on your genetics, which is supposed to protect us from the insurance industry.

Q: Do customers realize the ramifications of handing over their DNA?

A: Nobody predicted how this information could be used. GEDmatch, a public database in the U.S. with few privacy provisions, is a case in point. Here, consumers uploaded their genetic results from Ancestry and 23andMe to find relatives. In spring 2018, without permission from the database or its users, the police uploaded the DNA from an old rape-murder case (the “Golden State Killer”), found distant matches and, working with a genealogist, rooted out the criminal: 72-year-old Navy veteran Joseph James DeAngelo.

GEDmatch has become an invaluable source for law enforcement. This raises very serious issues of genetic privacy.

“No more family secrets. When submitting your own genetic information, you’re providing the genealogy of your children, grandparents, distant cousins, entire family.” – Julia Creet

This really showed customers that you’re not just submitting your own genetic information, you’re providing the genealogy of your children, grandparents, distant cousins, entire family.

This is what people don’t seem to understand about DNA: Privacy is antithetical to genealogy. The real issue now is how to protect the privacy of people who haven’t uploaded their DNA, which is next to impossible.

Nobody predicted how this information, DNA, could be used, says Creet

Q: What’s the scariest thing about this?

A: Columbia University Professor Yaniv Erlich, the chief science officer of MyHeritage, recently said that given the amount of information that’s in the public databases, you could track the identity of 60 per cent of the U.S. white population. (This population has undertaken the genealogical quest more readily than the non-white population, for various reasons.)

“This industry has taken that potent, spiritual, all-too-human need to belong … and monetized it in a particularly exploitative way.” – Julia Creet

He also predicted that all you need is two per cent of the population’s DNA to be able to identify everyone in that population. That’s the statistic I find the most disturbing. Any idea we had about privacy is basically over. No more family secrets.

This industry has taken that potent, spiritual, all-too-human need to belong or trace our origins … and monetized it in a particularly exploitative way.

Q: This is timely, policy-applicable work. What kind of support has York University provided?

A: York’s a wonderful place. I’ve had huge support while grant writing and from Research Accounting.

I came here in 1998 and was basically left alone – that is, I could do whatever I wanted as long as it made sense as a research project.

I never do anything by the book. York has allowed me that kind of creativity. At York, we’re very good at recognizing talent that doesn’t fit into standard or conventional disciplines.

To buy the book, The Genealogical Sublime, visit the publisher’s website. To learn more about Creet, visit her Faculty profile page.

To learn more about Research & Innovation at York, follow us at @YUResearch; watch our new animated video, which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity such as artificial intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the snapshot infographic for a glimpse of the year’s successes.

By Megan Mueller, senior manager, research communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, York University, muellerm@yorku.ca