My dissertation examines how and why personal and familial genealogy has been transformed from the niche pursuit of family tree hobbyists into a multi-billion-dollar industry with transversal sociopolitical significance.
Over the last decade, Ancestry.com has come to dominate this industry and has amassed an astonishing collection of over 30 billion archival artefacts including international birth, marriage, and death records, census and voter data, immigration and travel records, military enlistment and casualty records, school and church directories, and tax, crime, land, and will records. However, political scientists have been slow to recognize Ancestry’s ‘data-fied’ and internationalized archival breadth as a phenomenon worthy of deeper investigation. Such investigation is warranted not only because of the colossal data store this private actor has amassed, but also because of the cultural-governmental logics that have contributed to the stockpiling and subsequent deployment of this data toward various ends.
As such, my dissertation examines the contingent emergence of Ancestry.com and its increasing entanglement in political questions of identity, archive, and technology. My thesis positions Ancestry.com as a key political actor in digitalized societies (alongside other data giants like Google and Facebook) and as a political actor that necessarily blurs the public-private divide via its consolidation and deployment of a global and digitized data archive. This research will illuminate the role Ancestry.com plays in inciting, reproducing, transforming, and governing wider sociopolitical conceptions of identity, archive, history, place and belonging. Further, this work will advance scholarly understanding of new modes of governing populations and will materialize and problematize the ‘culture of identity’ that is inseparable from the proliferation of these new modes of governance.
I am lucky to be conducting my dissertation research under the dynamic supervision of Dr. William Walters, whose expertise and mentorship remains invaluable to the project and its unfolding. I am also grateful to have received research funding from OGS, SSHRC, The Department of Political Science and the Faculty of Graduate & Post-Doctoral Affairs in support of my research.
In addition to being a PhD candidate, I am also proud to serve as a Teaching & Research Assistant and Contract Instructor in Carleton’s Department of Political Science. Teaching and working with undergraduate students has been one of the greatest honours of my graduate career to date.
I also coordinate The Research Group, a monthly, interdisciplinary seminar that brings together visiting scholars and graduate students from Political Science, Sociology & Anthropology, and Law & Legal Studies to present and discuss ongoing work. The dialogue produced in and through these monthly sessions and the scholarly friendships carved out of them have been integral to my research process.
More broadly, my areas of scholarly interest include: the politics of truth, symbolic/linguistic capital, political theology, biopolitics, aesthetics, spectral materialism, governmentality, plasticity, psychoanalysis, contingency, crisis & event, the anarchic, international political sociology, international political economy, and ethics of care.