Congratulations to PhD candidate Hailey-Ann Walker for winning the 2024 CPSA 3 Minute Thesis Competition!
About Hailey-Ann’s research:
“In the last two decades, genealogy has been transformed from the niche pursuit of family-tree hobbyists into a multi-billion-dollar international industry. Ancestry.com dominates this industry. With the help of public government archives from around the world and the active participation of its massive international userbase, Ancestry has consolidated an astonishing collection of over 60 billion digitized archival artefacts and a genetic database with over 25 million DNA specimens from around the globe. Hailey’s work aims to analyze Ancestry.com not simply as another “big data” corporate success story, but as a distinctly political phenomenon.
Ancestry’s ever-expanding digital database is a useful tool for modern governments because it centralizes enormous amounts of population data that can be used by states to legitimate (or delegitimate) ethnic claims to land as much as it can be used in law enforcement or to measure genetic mortality statistics. However, Ancestry.com conveniently serves the ends of modern government in a more fundamental way: by facilitating the continual incitement, participation, and formation of governable subjects who offer themselves up willingly, and even eagerly, as identities that can be known, compartmentalized, and managed.
Whether it’s being able to prove what ethnic group we belong to, what land we are indigenous to, or what generational traumas and triumphs we carry on behalf of our ancestors, we, the subjects of modern government, are routinely called to know, represent, and document the truth of our identities. Ancestry.com makes this concretely possible by offering individuals instant access to the raw materials of self-curation in both archival and genetic form.”