Books

U of T English prof's dystopian tale explores privilege and peril in the Global South

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 14:41:53 +0000

U of T English prof's dystopian tale explores privilege and peril in the Global South

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 08/02/2024 - 10:41

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Randy Boyagoda says he got the idea for his latest novel while sitting alone at the dining room table in a guest apartment in Italy, where he taught a class for several years (supplied image)

Sean McNeely

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Our Community

Books

English

Faculty of Arts & Science

Humanities

Literature

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Little Sanctuary, Randy Boyagoda's first novel for young adults, is about the children of a wealthy family who are sent to a refuge on a remote island as their country is ravaged by war and disease

Randy Boyagoda, an author and ��߲ݴ�ý professor, came up with the idea for his first young adult novel in 2018 while teaching a class in Rome, where he found himself alone in a guest apartment that, a year earlier, had been filled with his family.

He recently told the CBC that it was an empty dining room table that got him thinking about what one would do if they knew their loved ones were about to disappear, setting the stage his dystopian tale, Little Sanctuary.

Published in June, the novel is set in a fictional country in the Global South that is ravaged by conflict and disease. The children of a wealthy family are sent to a special camp on a remote island for safekeeping alongside other children of the elite.

However, the children discover the camp isn’t what it appears to be and become suspicious of their so-called guardians. The main character, Sabel, along with her siblings, devise a plan to escape.

Little Sanctuary is the story of children from the Global South living in a world that is falling apart.

“I don't think I started out with the intention of writing a young adult novel,” says Boyagoda, a professor of English in U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science and vice dean, undergraduate. “I wrote a short story for The Walrus that was published in 2021 during the pandemic.”

Boyagoda and his wife later organized a family book club meeting in their backyard where they talked about the short story, which he had left open-ended.

His youngest daughter had a query: What happened next?

“And it struck me as a question worth pursuing,” says Boyagoda. “So I began writing it out – what would happen next to these kids? Where would they go? What would happen to them wherever they were going?”

Boyagoda recounted the story’s origins on CBC’s Radio’s The Next Chapter.

“I really missed my family, because of the memory of when we had all been together there,” he said on the program. “I started imagining a table full of family, and then just being there by yourself. What could have changed? Why did this family disappear? That got to me, and I thought, ‘What would you do if you knew your family was going to disappear?’ You would have a final meal together, before sending your kids off for safekeeping. That's how the story started.”

Focusing on a privileged family from the Global South was intentional, Boyagoda says.

“The popularity of dystopian fiction over the last few years in television and in books has been marked by a consistent white protagonist,” he says. “Think about The Hunger Games, or Station Eleven. They tend to be privileged white people who are suddenly faced with a world that’s falling apart. And so we follow these heroes as they figure out how to survive.”

Meanwhile, other stories set in the Global South tend to involve characters who live in worlds of extreme poverty and risk.

“The Global South is also full of ridiculously wealthy people,” says Boyagoda. “So what would happen if the main characters in a dystopic novel weren't upper middle class white people? What if a young adult novel about the Global South wasn't about extremely poor brown people?”

The book begins with a quote from Franz Kafka: “Children simply don’t have any time in which they might be children.” That resonated with Boyagoda, touching on the idea that, though children are often thrust into very adult situations and are forced to act and behave like adults, their childlike behaviour still shines through.

“Sabel and her four siblings have to figure out what they're going to do when they realize things aren't as they seemed. And as a result, they don't have time to be children.

“They can't just be kids about it, they can't take for granted that they're going to be kept safe. And yet, they're still children, they still bicker. There's still sibling rivalry, even in situations where the stakes could be mortal. There's still crushes, there's still competition for attention.”

Boyagoda says the book also offers an opportunity for young readers and their parents to discuss some of the world’s current challenges.

“One of the ways that dystopia generally works is that we’re meant to imagine a version of contemporary life taken to its negative extremes,” he says. “These are books in which civil war, disease, inequality, pressures of climate have been taken to such an extreme point that things have broken in this world.

“So what happens to our humanity, to our prospects as individuals, family members and friends when current challenges and sources of division and decline are taken to their extremes? It would be my hope that a novel like this would be an occasion for parents and children together to talk these things through.”

Boyagoda also hopes young readers will enjoy rereading book.

“I've always felt this as a reader myself,” he says. “Whenever I want to reread something, that's an indicator that something significant has happened in the story that will sustain my imagination a second time through. Sometimes it's the beauty of the writing. Sometimes it's the intensity of the story. And this might be the case with Little Sanctuary – it might be to figure out the mystery in retrospect.

“In other words, there's lots of Easter eggs, but you don't see them the first time through.”

Robarts Library at 50: How Fort Book became the ‘campus living room’

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 13:58:01 +0000

Robarts Library at 50: How Fort Book became the ‘campus living room’

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 09/26/2023 - 09:58

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As many as 18,000 people visit U of T’s Robarts Libary in a single day, while countless more access its collection online (photo by U of T Communications)

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Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

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As it celebrates its half-centennial, Robarts Library is reflecting on its past – and looking towards its future – with an exhibit that traces the library’s history

The ��߲ݴ�ý’s campus weekly, The Varsity, greeted students with a front-page photograph of John P. Robarts Library in 1973 – then a new, impossible-to-miss concrete giant on St. George Street.

“Welcome to U of T and Fort Book,” the headline shouted.

Cover of The Varsity newspaper from September 12, 1973 (��߲ݴ�ý Archives)

Now, as it celebrates its half-centennial, Robarts is reflecting on its past – and looking towards its future – with an exhibit that traces the library’s history, including the architecture, technology and social movements that shaped its evolution.

Originally built to house 2.7 million volumes and accommodate 4,100 people in reading rooms and study carrels, Robarts aimed to be the largest academic library building in the world, intended to make room for U of T’s growing library collection and the influx of students born during the Baby Boom.

Then-U of T President Claude Bissell, who played a central role in its construction, called it “the final, climactic stage in the development of the higher learning at the ��߲ݴ�ý.”

The triangular library complex included the School of Library Science and what is now the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. The building’s namesake, Premier John Robarts, said the buildings – which came with a $41.7-million price tag – should not be judged based on cost, “but in terms of how many people would pass through them over the next fifty years.”

These days, as many as 18,000 people visit Robarts in a single day, while countless more access its collection online. The index card catalogue and coat check for visitors are long gone, but Robarts is now home to spaces for nursing, meditation, and mindfulness – even a family study room designed for parents and children, the first space of its kind in a Canadian academic library. Although the U of T Libraries collection contains more than 11 million physical items in total, it now mainly acquires electronic material and hosts data centres with a storage capacity of 1.5 petabytes.

Yet, while the library’s layout and technology have changed, its role remains the same: to support research, discovery and community, Chief Librarian Larry Alford said. “When Robarts Library opened, it was very much seen as a place for students – and faculty, but especially students – to come together to study and work together,” he said. “That hasn’t changed at all. I think it’s as important now as it was in 1973.”

Robarts Common (photo by Matthew Volpe)

To create much-needed study space, the library recently underwent its first expansion in 42 years with the addition of a free-standing, five-storey building on its west side. The project was made possible through the generous support of the late Russell and Katherine Morrison, along with one thousand other donors. Robarts Common came equipped with 1,200 new study spots – a 25 per cent increase – including soundproofed rooms with big-screen TVs for group study.

A group of students on the second floor of Robarts Common (photo by Hanna Borodina)

In the realm of technology, Robarts Library has long been a centre for innovation. Under the leadership of Robert Blackburn, chief librarian from 1954 to 1981, U of T Libraries became an early adopter of an automated catalogue. And while it was not the first institution to have a computer-output microfilm catalogue, Blackburn said Robarts was the first large research library anywhere that had converted its entire catalogue. “Our pioneering in the field was not unnoticed or unappreciated,” he wrote in Evolution of the Heart, a history of U of T Libraries.

The first online catalogue, “Felix,” came into service in 1987.

Today, Robarts Library supports digital scholarship including in the field of non-destructive analysis of ancient books by examining the physical properties of ancient volumes using techniques such as atomic force spectrometry.

Jesse Carliner, a user services librarian and co-curator of the Robarts Library exhibit with university archivist Tys Klumpenhouwer, said technology was not the only important driver of change at the library – so, too, was the U of T community.

Student sit-in protesting stack access to Robarts Library (photo by Robert Lansdale)

“The library has evolved from being this very formal, book centre to being more of a socially oriented student centre,” Carliner said. “It went from being an imposing concrete monolith to kind of the campus living room.”

While initially only faculty and graduate students were supposed to be granted access to the bookstacks, undergraduate students staged protests to open the stacks to everyone – and the library has continued to reshape itself over the years, hosting 2SLGBTQ+ events and adding prayer rooms and an ablution room for Muslim students. Just last summer, Fisher Library hosted Raymond Frogner, head of the archives at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, for a talk about confronting historic biases and promoting Indigenous knowledge within library collections.

What has remained constant, however, is the lively debate surrounding the library’s imposing concrete exterior.

The Brutalist landmark divided opinion from the start, with architect Ronald Thom saying it “represents everything in architecture that is arrogant and wrong.” It has been compared to everything from a “giant chess piece” to a “sci-fi version of a medieval castle.” But for the building’s many critics, there seems to be an equal number of admirers. Italian author Umberto Eco described it as a “masterpiece of contemporary architecture” and, more recently, Robarts topped Monocle’s list of architectural must-sees in its Toronto travel guide.

Larry Alford (photo by Paul Terefenko)

Chief Librarian Alford said he understands why the building’s architecture is controversial, but has always been a fan. “If you look inside the building, as I’ve often done, you stand on the second floor and look up, you can’t help but be impressed and it becomes clear that the architects paid a lot of attention to every detail,” he said.

As for what the library will look like 50 years from now, Alford said it’s impossible to predict – though he imagines it will play an increasingly important role in AI-assisted analysis and authentication of information.

“If you think about the radical changes over the last five decades, I don’t think any librarians could have said where we were headed.”

This story has been condensed. The original can be found here.

New book by U of T law professor Kent Roach examines the injustice of wrongful convictions in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 19:46:27 +0000

New book by U of T law professor Kent Roach examines the injustice of wrongful convictions in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 04/21/2023 - 15:46

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In his latest book, U of T law professor Kent Roach outlines Canada's history of of wrongful convictions and how the legal system can better safeguard justice (photo of Roach by Faculty of Law)

Topic

Kent Roach, a professor in the Faculty of Law at the ��߲ݴ�ý, has spent decades sounding the alarm on wrongful convictions in Canada.

His new research underlines the dangers of wrongful convictions based on false guilty pleas or imagined crimes that never happened.

“In judgments, the courts recite ‘the facts’ – but sometimes the legal system gets ‘the facts’ wrong, and the wrongfully convicted and their families suffer as a result,” Roach says.

His latest book – Wrongfully Convicted: Guilty Pleas, Imagined Crimes, and What Canada Must Do to Safeguard Justice – bookends his trilogy on Canada’s criminal justice system with previously published books on Canadian policing and the case that saw Gerald Stanley acquitted in the 2018 killing of Colten Boushie.

All three books, published in the span of less than five years, strongly advocate for policy change and reform.

Roach's 2019 book Canadian Justice Indigenous Injustice was shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for political writing. And Canadian Policing: Why and How It Must Change, published last year, was a finalist for both the Balsillie and Donner prizes for public policy books.

His books also grapple with injustice towards Indigenous people in Canada’s justice system.

“Wrongful convictions affect the so-called ‘usual suspects’ – and in Canada, the ‘usual suspects’ are too often Indigenous, racialized, socio-economically marginalized or suffering with mental health challenges,” Roach says.

Another thread in his work is the necessity of police reform. He says police can still use aggressive and deceitful ways of questioning suspects that are not always prohibited by judicial regulation of police interrogation techniques.

Roach adds that one of the lessons to be learned from Wrongfully Convicted is that police should not be so aggressive when interviewing people who are vulnerable, have cognitive challenges, or are suffering from addiction or mental health issues. He notes that police need to consider alternative suspects and be aware of stereotypes that associate groups and individuals with crime.

“Police are subject to a very natural human tendency of zeroing-in on a suspect and interpreting evidence so that it confirms the suspect's guilt – while disregarding evidence that points in another direction, such as an alternative suspect,” he says.

Though not perfect, computerized case-management tools can help, Roach says, adding such tools are currently underutilized but can provide case-linkage and analysis to help guard against tunnel vision or confirmation bias.

“If we wait for the courts to correct these errors, it's too late. The courts alone cannot produce good policing.”

In 2007, Roach was appointed research director of Ontario’s public inquiry into systemic concerns in pediatric forensic pathology in the wake of revelations that former forensic pathologist Charles Smith had performed flawed child autopsies that resulted in wrongful convictions.

Amanda Carling (photo by Jesse Johnston)

In Wrongfully Convicted, Roach revisits the cases that were the result of Smith’s misleading forensic evidence. A section of the book examines ‘imagined crimes’ that never happened – such crimes constitute one-third of the wrongful convictions recorded in the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions that Roach co-founded with Métis lawyer Amanda Carling, a 2012 graduate of the JD program at U of T's Faculty of Law.

Roach and Carling co-taught a seminar on wrongful convictions at U of T, which led to the development of the registry.

“Smith had suspicions directed towards young, single mothers and racialized men. The system, which is designed to be a check on mere suspicions, didn't stop Smith's,” Roach says.

He notes there are more recent cases of ‘imagined crime’ wrongful convictions. In fact, three more cases involving such imagined crimes will soon be added to the registry with the help of U of T JD alumni Jessie Stirling, Joel Voss and Sarah Harland-Logan.

The registry was launched this past February with 83 cases. The three new cases will bring the total to 86 – two cases involved Black parents wrongfully convicted in the death of their child and another case of a woman with intellectual challenges who is unhoused.

Roach explains that both the registry and his new book are designed to raise awareness that wrongful convictions are not just a historical or U.S. problem.

“I want Canadians to know that we too have problems in our criminal justice system. The registry is just the tip of the iceberg," he says.

"The real question is, how large is the iceberg? We really won’t know that until we have a better system than we do now.”

Earlier this year, just days before the registry’s launch, the federal government introduced legislation to create a federal commission to review potential cases of wrongful conviction.

Roach led the research on A Miscarriages of Justice Commission report in November 2021, which advocated for the creation of an independent federal commission to consider cases of wrongful conviction.

He says the announcement of a permanent federal commission to investigate allegations of wrongful convictions is an important next step in addressing the issue.

Roach notes that the proposed commission will need to be properly funded and staffed to be able to help people, and will need to be made aware of the realities of wrongful convictions – including false guilty pleas and crimes that never happened.

"We also need to find a way to compensate the wrongfully convicted more quickly and humanely for the terrible injustices done, in all our names," he says.

“It's a long, hard climb to reverse or remedy a wrongful conviction."

Danny Ramadan is U of T Scarborough’s new writer-in-residence

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 14:22:42 +0000

Danny Ramadan is U of T Scarborough’s new writer-in-residence

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 02/06/2023 - 09:22

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An author and advocate for LGBTQ+ Syrian refugees, Danny Ramadan is bringing his lifetime of writing experience to U of T Scarborough as writer-in-residence, a role that connects celebrated writers with the school community (submitted photo)

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As a gay person growing up in Syria, Danny Ramadan says every day was like taking a paper cut to his mental health.

“I was navigating a lot of trauma. I was a queer child in a very dysfunctional family system and a hyper-masculine, working-class environment,” he says. “I felt like my mentality kept crashing and I kept putting it back together by writing about it. Writing was how I didn't die by a thousand paper cuts.”

What began as a coping mechanism led to several books, articles and short stories that have garnered awards and critical acclaim. His debut novel, The Clothesline Swing, was named among the best books of the year by the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star, while his children’s book, Salma the Syrian Chef, won the Nautilus Book Award and The Middle East Book Award.

He’s now bringing his years of writing experience to U of T Scarborough as writer-in-residence, a role that connects celebrated writers with the school community through office hours, workshops and appearances in classrooms and events.

Ramadan has been a published writer since age 10, when his first poem appeared in a children’s magazine in Damascus. No one else in his life shared his passion, but he kept writing, finding himself particularly drawn to short stories. Ramadan says he didn’t inherit his writing prowess, but adds that his family did hand down their voices. He internalized the voice of his father, which espouses toxic masculinity, and one from his mother, which tells him to doubt himself.

“Sometimes you have the voices of several doubters living in your head. I think that's a fluffy term for childhood trauma, the voices we take on that are foreign to ourselves,” he says.

Ramadan’s life changed at age 17 when he first said out loud to his family that he was gay. Ramadan experienced homelessness and slept on friends’ couches until he found his own place – all while still using writing as a lifeline. He examined everything around him, including the concept of coming out. Unlike in Toronto, a city where LBGTQ+ organizations, institutions and communities are common, he says coming out in Damascus often means losing every form of support.

“Queerness is not a club where you need to come out to receive your membership card,” he says. “You need to navigate the world according to the dynamics around you.”

At age 20, Ramadan published his first collection of short stories in Egypt, drawing job offers that led him to move to the country for seven years. In 2010, he returned to Syria as national unrest culminated in the Syrian civil war. He began running an underground centre for LGBTQ+ Syrians out of his home, an endeavor he calls “beautifully naive,” and one that landed him in prison for six weeks.

Upon his release, he was declared persona non grata by the Syrian government and moved to Lebanon as a refugee. Writing fiction has always been his life’s calling, but it didn’t initially offer a steady source of income. He became a journalist to pay the bills and by his late-20s was reporting for the Washington Post from the heart of the refugee crisis in the Middle East.

The three years he spent as a reporter are not a time Ramadan looks back on fondly. He spent hours counting bodies in YouTube videos, interviewing rebels and dissecting massacres for articles that sometimes didn’t get published, depending on what the ever-churning news cycle deemed most important that day.

“I never felt like I had my own voice. I was just part of a much larger machine as a journalist,” he says. “In my creative writing, I feel like I'm my own boss. I am the master of my own craft and I have a village of folks who are supporting me.”

In 2014, he arrived in Vancouver as a refugee, where he lives with his husband and dog. He earned a master’s degree in fine arts in creative writing from the University of British Columbia.

Ramadan has 18 doves tattooed on his bicep – one for each LGBTQ+ Syrian refugee his annual fundraiser, “An Evening in Damascus,” has brought to Canada – and he still has to add three more birds. His charity has raised more than $300,000 to support LGBTQ+ Syrian refugees.

Ramadan’s memoir is scheduled for release in the summer of 2024 and he is working on a series of short stories and children’s books. On campus, he recently hosted a reading and holds office hours on Thursdays.

“I am a big fan of talking to folks,” he says. “I'm very approachable. So let's talk.”

With latest work, ��߲ݴ�ý grad challenges children's book genre

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 17:11:45 +0000

With latest work, ��߲ݴ�ý grad challenges children's book genre

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 02/02/2023 - 12:11

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Michael Gayle, a graduate of the psychology program at U of T Scarborough, took an unconventional approach to his third children's book (photo by Alexa Battler)

Topic

With just a few lines of text on a red background, the cover of Michael Gayle’s third children’s book is a far cry from the usual jumble of hues and images competing for a kid’s interest.

Flipping it open reveals other unusual elements in the children’s book genre: pages full of intricate illustrations, extravagant characters and a message left open for interpretation.

“I think there is an idea of what a piece of children’s literature should look and feel like. I’m interested in challenging those definitions in the pursuit of producing something that offers a slightly different experience,” says Gayle, who graduated from the ��߲ݴ�ý Scarborough in 2021 with a degree in psychology.

Titled Krumpp’s First Taste, Gayle’s latest work follows a little girl who tries to cheer up the world’s grumpiest curmudgeon by giving him her most beloved snack – crumpets and tea. But the book has no cut-and-dry moral or life lesson. By contrast, Gayle prefers embraces an approach that may seem bold with such a young crowd: Trust your reader.

“Often when I go into bookshops, I feel like at some point in the creative chain someone has underestimated how smart kids are,” says Gayle, who writes under the pen name Magic Mike. “I think it’s much harder to go over their heads then we think.”

Gayle taught himself the basics of digital illustration through online research and English courses he took at U of T Scarborough. But he says developing a unique visual and storytelling style is a largely solitary pursuit.

His process is guided by a piece of advice that may seem strange for his genre since it comes from Stephen King: Above all, write for yourself.

“It’s hard for me to entertain the idea of making something singularly for the sake of it being publishable. I’m not sure that I would enjoy whatever success, if any, came from something I didn’t genuinely love or believe in,” he explains. “I would feel too disconnected from my work.”

Gayle drew inspiration from a range of artists and mediums to develop the stylized look of Krumpp’s First Taste (submitted photo)

It’s been four years since Gayle published his last children’s book, The Very Unluckily Lucky Quaroo – time he’s spent “consuming” the work of others. He says he passively looks to other artists for inspiration. He likens his process to baking – adding ingredients until he’s created something fresh.

Within Krumpp’s First Taste are echoes of filmmaker Tim Burton’s darker atmospheres and dialogue style, John Tenniel’s whimsical illustrations in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and filmmaker Wes Anderson’s use of symmetry and detail. Nods to the theatre world are also peppered throughout the book – the cover is designed to emulate a classic Broadway playbill and the book is divided into three acts.

Gayle says he has also discovered ideas by keeping his head up and his mind open. When ideas strike, no matter how fragmented, he records them on his phone using voice or text notes and revisits them later.

“I don't have any tactical advice in terms of whose hand to shake or what type of pen to use,” Gayle says when asked for any tips to share with aspiring writers. “So, I guess my advice, if any, would be to embrace difficulty. It’s hard to make good things. I think it helps also to be ridiculously confident, even when it feels unfounded – and equally self-critical.”

While his degree in psychology isn’t directly applicable to writing for children, Gayle says seeing his university professors dedicate their careers to niches within their field carried its own lesson: “There's a virtue in becoming really good at one thing.”

Gayle will spend February travelling to public schools across the Greater Toronto Area to conduct readings as part of his second book tour.

The Legal Singularity: U of T Law profs on how AI will make the law 'radically' better

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 16:16:44 +0000

The Legal Singularity: U of T Law profs on how AI will make the law 'radically' better

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 11/04/2022 - 12:16

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(Image by Pitiphothivichit via Getty Images)

Nina Haikara

Topic

Our Community

Artificial Intelligence

Benjamin Alarie, a professor in the ��߲ݴ�ý’s Faculty of Law, has long believed artificial intelligence will bring seismic change to the legal profession and, consequently, society – resulting in what he’s dubbed ‘the legal singularity.’

Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie

In a forthcoming book, Alarie tackles the topic with Abdi Aidid, who recently joined the faculty as an assistant professor.

The pair argue that the proliferation of AI-enabled technology – and specifically the advent of legal prediction – will radically change the law profession and facilitate “a functional ‘completeness’ of law, where the law is at once extraordinarily more complex in its specification than it is today, and yet operationally vastly more knowable, fairer, and clearer for its subjects.”

Alarie says that’s in stark contrast to how law is practised now.

“There is a ton of uncertainty in the law – we often just don't know what the right legal answer is,” says Alarie, who is the Osler chair of business law. “Uncertainty about facts and law drives litigation. Even if there aren't disputes about the events involved, litigation arises due to a dispute about how the law applies to those facts.”

Alarie and Aidid suggest the book,The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better (��߲ݴ�ý Press, 2023), should be of interest not only to lawyers and technologists, but anyone interested in the future of the labour force or social institutions beyond the law.

“The legal singularity reflects the full development of our legal system, becoming more complete and accessible through advanced technology,” says Aidid. “The idea is that once we are able to reduce uncertainty, individuals and institutions will have a real-time sense of their legal rights and obligations.”

Alarie’s interest in legal technology began more than a decade ago, when he served as associate dean of the faculty’s JD program and was tasked with revisiting how the law faculty delivered its first-year curriculum.

“I remember sitting at my desk and thinking, it’s been almost 40 years since we’ve had a major reform to the curriculum,” he says. “What could change over the course of the next several decades?

“I thought about the deep learning work that was being done by [University Professor Emeritus] Geoffrey Hinton in the computer science department [in the Faculty of Arts & Science] here at the U of T, and how computing power keeps doubling every couple of years and is becoming massively less expensive over time.”

He also recalled Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a renowned legal scholar and former U.S. Supreme Court justice, once offered a provocative view that law is all about prediction. Alarie thought to himself: “Well, what is machine learning? It’s a prediction technology. All these ideas were swimming around in my mind: machine learning is about prediction. Machine learning is getting way better. Law is ultimately about prediction.

“I'd better be thinking about how machine learning is going to influence the practice of law, because that's going to have big implications for how we want to teach our students.”

In 2015, Alarie co-founded legal tech startup Blue J Legal with U of T Law faculty members Anthony Niblett and Albert Yoon. The company’s software draws upon AI to provide instant and comprehensive answers in complex areas of tax, labour, and employment law.

Aidid joined Blue J Legal in 2018.

“While I was an adjunct professor here, teaching courses in legal research and writing, I was seeing first-hand the difficulty [with the way] we currently do legal research and was just hoping for a technological solution,” says Aidid, who served as the startup’s director and vice-president of research, and remains with the company as an innovation specialist.

“Being able to help build Blue J and contribute to improving a profession that I care deeply about was really appealing to me.”

The authors argue that the legal profession has so far failed to keep pace with other industries and professions.

“If you were transported back 50 years into a law school classroom, or a courtroom, it would look largely the same as it does today,” says Aidid. “There might be a laptop on someone's desk, but by and large, we're doing the same things. It’s not just about tech adoption – it's about changing some of the core assumptions about what it means to be a good lawyer, legal academic and a good law student.”

That includes how lawyers bill their time.

“If you come to me and you ask me a legal question, I might have an instinct about the answer but in order to give you professionally sound advice, I'm going to go off and do research until I feel fairly certain about my advice,” says Aidid. “But with the advent of machine learning, you're able to quickly synthesize all the case law in a matter of seconds.”

Alarie says future technological innovation that can interpret legislation, legal principles and translate them into appropriate legal guidance will result in better legal decisions for society. He says it’s not meant to supplant or replace legal professionals, but to enable them to provide fairer and more informed decisions. “For example, it would provide judges with more information to better exercise their discretion,” Alarie says.

He adds that that the notion of a legal singularity is best regarded as an ongoing process of improvement, rather than a final destination. Aidid, for his part, emphasizes the important role lawyers will play in making sure legal technologies are “designed appropriately, ethically and effectively.”

One thing is clear, the authors say: the application of AI to the law is no longer a fanciful sci-fi thought experiment.

“How we get from here to there – wherever that there is – could be a bumpy ride,” says Alarie. “Our goal is to really spread these questions – about the legal singularity – as widely as possible because we don't think they have easy answers, but they are important questions.”

With her debut novel a bestseller, U of T alumna Amita Parikh aims to help underrepresented writers

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 13:15:48 +0000

With her debut novel a bestseller, U of T alumna Amita Parikh aims to help underrepresented writers

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 08/24/2022 - 09:15

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Amita Parikh began writing what she hoped would someday become a book in 2014, publishing her debut novel, The Circus Train, earlier this year (photo by Helen Tansey)

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Amita Parikh was a member of Victoria College when she was a student at the ��߲ݴ�ý – just like acclaimed author Margaret Atwood.

Now, Parikh has something else in common with Atwood: a novel on the Toronto Star bestselling books in Canada list.

“I'm certainly not putting myself in the same company, but it makes me laugh looking back on it. I couldn't have predicted I would write a book, let alone a bestselling book,” says Parikh, who earned her honours bachelor of science from U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science in 2006 with a major in human biology and minors in Spanish and zoology.

The Circus Train tells the story of Lena Papadopoulos, the daughter of an illusionist at the World of Wonders, a travelling circus that tours around Europe during the Second World War. Fascinated by science, Lena feels out of place at the circus – until her life is turned upside down when she rescues a mysterious stowaway.

The Circus Train was published by HarperCollins Canada in March 2022 and became an instant national bestseller.

“Lena’s love of science and medicine was largely a result of me studying at U of T,” Parikh says. “I learned and was exposed to so much. I remember in one of my bio labs, we isolated DNA in its purest form, and I thought that was so cool.”

There are several links to U of T throughout the novel. For example, Lena’s visits to anatomy museums were inspired by Parikh’s time in Grant’s Museum in the basement of U of T’s Medical Sciences building. Lena has polio and uses a wheelchair, an aspect of the text informed by Parikh’s studies of how the polio vaccine was developed and how the virus affected children.

Lena’s feelings of isolation were also inspired by the author’s experiences. As a life sciences student, many of Parikh’s classmates were studying to become doctors or pursue academia, but neither of those career paths felt like the right fit.

“I felt so out of place and alone, like I’d failed somehow,” she says. “But looking back, I am really proud that I stuck it out and finished, and I'm very proud to say I'm a ��߲ݴ�ý graduate.”

Parikh resolved to figure out what she really wanted to do and follow her passion. As a student, she loved writing for The Varsity, so she pursued journalism after convocation. After a couple of years, she switched to the tech industry and moved to Europe to build a career as a marketer and web developer. In 2014, she picked up writing again – this time creative writing instead of journalism. She began writing what she hoped would someday become a book and enrolled in a writing course at night. Her debut novel was the result.

“People say, ‘That’s so strange. You studied science and you work in tech, but you write creatively,’” she says. “I actually think they’re so similar. To come up with solutions to the biggest problems we have, you have to be really creative. You have to be creative at coding in tech. In science, how do you come up with a vaccine? You have to think on a different level.”

The Circus Train will be published in the U.S. in December 2022 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons and in the U.K. in January 2023 by Little, Brown Book Group.

“I’m still trying to wrap my head around it,” Parikh says, referring to the novel’s success. “It wasn't something I expected. I just wanted to write a book and stay true to myself and create a world people enjoy. Everything else has just been icing on the cake. I'm thrilled that it's touched so many people.”

Between working in tech and writing her second novel, spare time is a rare commodity for Parikh. Yet, when she can, she likes to give back by mentoring aspiring writers. She’s also developing a scholarship for underrepresented writers.

“I often get asked, usually by other people of colour, ‘What was your experience like as a writer of colour?’ These conversations have come to the forefront, as they should,” she says. “Publishing is a very white industry. I do think it’s changing. But I can only speak from my own personal experience. I didn't have any pushback. I have not had anyone say, ‘What are you doing here? You’re not the right colour.’ But I’m aware that it happens.”

Her experience in publishing has been encouraging, she adds, recalling a conversation with her agent in which Parikh suggested using a pseudonym.

“I had been conditioned for so long to see books written by Indian authors only being about the immigrant experience or an Indian-inspired rom-com. I'm generalizing, but, by and large, that's what I was reading. And while I love reading those types of stories, I can’t write them. My agent said, ‘Things are changing, and you should be so proud of what you've done. You shouldn't feel like you failed your community because you chose not to write about your own cultural background. You're a fiction author. You can write what you want.’”

Parikh’s scholarship will aim to help mitigate the high cost of writing courses and increase access to these educational opportunities for underrepresented writers.

“Even though I didn’t experience pushback from publishers, I am aware it happens. I’ve been lucky and simply wanted to pay it forward a little bit. I just think we're better when there's more diversity all around.”

In his first novel, PhD candidate Dashiel Carrera explores 'what it means to reckon with memory'

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 13:13:21 +0000

In his first novel, PhD candidate Dashiel Carrera explores 'what it means to reckon with memory'

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 07/29/2022 - 09:13

Cutline

Dashiel Carrera, a PhD student in computer science at U of T, explores the unreliability of memory in his debut novel The Deer, which will be available in Canada on Aug. 12 (photo by Dina Ginzburg/Dalkey Archive Press)

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Graduate Students

When you look back on events in your life, especially traumatic ones, did they really happen the way you remember them? Or have you altered your past slightly to make these experiences less upsetting or easier to accept?

Dashiel Carrera explores the unreliability of memory in his first novel – The Deer – a psychological thriller that will be available in Canada Aug. 12 from the Dalkey Archive Press.

For Carrera, who is completing his PhD with the department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science, writing a novel is a departure from his other creative pursuits. In addition to being a writer, he is an accomplished human-computer interaction (HCI) researcher, media artist and musician.

He has released five records through 75OrLess Records, won awards for his tech-art experiments and taken part in technology research at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard University's metaLAB.

So why write a traditional novel?

“The novel lets me explore certain possibilities of language and consciousness which I'm really interested in,” says Carrera. “Also, I can move through how people think, get really in-depth with interior monologues and try and piece together what it means to reckon with memory, reckon with the past.”

The Deer’s main character and narrator, Henry Haverford, is a physicist who returns to his hometown for his father’s funeral. He hasn’t been back to his childhood home in years. Driving at night in the pouring rain, having had a few drinks, he hits what appears to be a deer. But the way the police speak and behave around him suggests there’s a possibility it was something else. A deer’s corpse is never found.

As Haverford travels from the scene of the accident to his family’s house, the stress of the event triggers long-forgotten memories of loss and abuse, and he wrestles with the idea that his past, and reality as he knows it, may not be entirely accurate.

The story was inspired by real-life events. Carrera himself was on a long drive at night on a country road and in the span of 30 minutes was pulled over by police for speeding and later passed by the scene of an accident, possibly a deer or another animal.

“I went by it quickly, so I saw little splices of images like red flashing lights, police officers waving people forward and the car that looked like it had flipped over,” he says.

“And in large part, constructing this book was trying to understand that moment and trying to piece it together. The more I thought about it, the more it lent itself to fiction and it gave me an opportunity to think through some of the themes I was really excited about.”

Carrera was equally excited about the writing process for The Deer, which was quite unconventional and heavily influenced by his being involved in music production and recording at the time.

“If you want to record a song, you hit record and it goes for three minutes – you do whatever you can,” he says. “If you want to do something different, you have to go back and hit record and do it all over again, which is very different from how we think about writing. If you write a paragraph, you go can always go back and tinker with each line or move things around. There's no strict time limit.”

So Carrera would give himself one – often writing in short, timed bursts and sometimes aiming for a specific word count within an allotted period.

“I became interested in this idea of writing something that occurs in real time and is almost improvisational,” he says. “So I was often writing with a timer next to me.

“It's similar to a technique used in the early 20^th century in France called ‘surrealist automatism,’ where the attitude was just keep your pen moving – just keep going. And wherever your mind takes you, let it go that way. I think it lends a certain focus, which I find difficult to achieve otherwise. It gives the prose an urgency and a pressure which I think plays out in the book.”

Carrera would also experiment with writing during varying levels of consciousness: writing late at night, just on the verge of falling asleep or in those first moments upon waking up. “In this dreamlike, hallucinatory atmosphere, you're unsure of the world,” says Carrera. “There’s a little bit of unfamiliarity.”

And that’s exactly the tone he sets out to establish. He wants the reader to recognize that the narrator is unreliable – there’s a distinct element of uncertainty and unsettledness. In other words, Haverford shouldn’t be trusted.

Carrera believes this is a far more realistic way to tell a story. “Often you have a protagonist talking in first person, past tense, recalling exactly what occurred with complete perfection, which is impossible to replicate in reality,” he says.

Instead, Haverford relays what he thinks and recalls in short, choppy sentences and fragments of images and memories – a far more realistic approach to piecing together past events.

With The Deer set to hit bookshelves soon, Carrera is now focused on his research at U of T, including projects in the computer science department’s Dynamic Graphics Project lab.

“[The lab] is one of the most foremost in the world for doing human-computer interaction research,” he says. “Right now, my research focuses on what writing and reading is going to look like in the future, thinking about how digital mediums interact with that.”

He adds that, “the world is changing in how we piece together stories,” noting we spend so much time with fragments – of songs, texts and videos. “I’m thinking about the ways these fragments are shaping stories and what that means, and how it's shaping how we think.”

Yet, despite ever-evolving technologies, Carrera – who will attend a book launch at TYPE books on Queen Street West on Aug. 15 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. – says many still have an appetite to sit down with a good book.

“People still think in stories. Storytelling isn’t going anywhere.”

Calling it a 'natural fit,' U of T librarian opts for familiar setting in debut mystery novel

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 15:14:18 +0000

Calling it a 'natural fit,' U of T librarian opts for familiar setting in debut mystery novel

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 03/21/2022 - 11:14

Cutline

Eva’s Jurczyk, co-ordinator of humanities collections at Robarts Library, picked a university library as the setting for her novel The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections because it's a world she knows well (photo courtesy of Jurczyk)

Topic

Faculty of Information

For readers with ties to the ��߲ݴ�ý, Eva Jurczyk’s debut mystery novel The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections offers more than a whodunnit to solve.

In addition to figuring out who is responsible for the precious manuscripts going missing from a major university’s library, readers can also try to guess where she might have drawn inspiration from her day job at U of T.

Was that rare book librarian who works on a campus in downtown Toronto really once a spy? Is a senior administrator really training for an iron man competition in real life? And would it truly be that easy to replace a precious manuscript with a forgery while surrounded by scholars and subject matter experts?

Jurczyk, who is the co-ordinator of humanities collections at Robarts Library, says she was told a that a previous unpublished novel was “‘too quiet,’ which was probably a really polite way of saying it was too boring.” So the alumna of the Faculty of Information set about looking for an environment and a plot line that would keep readers turning the pages.

She settled on the world of libraries – which is both popular among book readers and a subject she knows intimately – and a mystery format.

While she doesn’t work in rare books, she had been a student assistant at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library while completing her master’s degree in library and information science. And as someone who had always been interested in the tales of art forgery and rare book theft regularly as chronicled by magazines like The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, Jurczyk says she thought that such a plot would be a “natural fit” if she was going to use a library setting.

She researched the topic systematically to understand both the type of person who would steal rare books and the manuscripts themselves.

“The thieves are mostly men – often single men. And it’s almost always people on the inside. There’s the occasional ‘smash and grab’ job, but it’s rare. It’s almost never for money because these are things that are incredibly hard to resell. It’s usually somebody who’s just deeply passionate about this material and wants to keep it for himself,” says Jurczyk.

“Often, when the police do catch these people, they find the work has just been in someone’s apartment, under their bed or in their filing cabinet, and they just wanted it near them. And so that’s who steals it – just somebody who loves the work so much that they need to be near it.”

Those are exactly the type of people who surround Jurczyk’s fictional 60-something librarian sleuth Liesl Weiss, who, after decades in a background role, suddenly finds herself promoted into the job of her charismatic boss when he has a stroke. The mystery she needs to solve: Which one of her quirky colleagues is responsible for the missing manuscripts, a classic Agatha Christie-style plot.

The book, published in January, has proven a success so far. The virtual book tour drew plenty of readers and Jurczyk was thrilled to see her debut novel reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, a rare honour. “It was not only that they reviewed it, but they were very kind about it, which was a dream come true,” says Jurczyk, who has almost finished a non-mystery second novel.

As for the mystery of how many of the characters come from real life, the short answer is bits and pieces. Yes, Jurczyk has worked with vain colleagues and those who used Discmans long past their sell-by date. She “ratcheted up these small characteristics” in her novel, but, no, she’s never reported to a bicycle helmet-toting university executive who was training for an iron man competition and flexed his calf muscles in meetings.

“I can also say with a lot of confidence that I did not ever work with anyone that was stealing priceless manuscripts,” she says, a reminder to those who would believe otherwise that her book is indeed, as it’s billed, a work of fiction.

'I'm not content with the world we live in': ��߲ݴ�ý grad uses fantasy genre to pursue real-life change

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 21:14:34 +0000

'I'm not content with the world we live in': ��߲ݴ�ý grad uses fantasy genre to pursue real-life change

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 11/17/2021 - 16:14

Cutline

Marquela Nunes, who graduates on Nov. 18, is using the fantasy book genre to create a safe space to unpack and rewrite history so that LGBTQ rights and racial equality have always existed (photo courtesy of Marquela Nunes)

Topic

It was through fantasy that Marquela Nunes found an outlet for real-world activism.

The soon-to-be graduate of the ��߲ݴ�ý Scarborough used the book genre – characterized by elements such as magic and epic characters – to create a safe space to unpack and rewrite history so that LGBTQ rights and racial equality have always existed.

Her debut novel, the first draft of which has been completed, pulls from the mythologies and histories of West Africa and Central Asia in order to “re-imagine how wondrous our world could be.”

“It’s almost too raw to write non-fiction because I’m not content with the world we live in,” Nunes says. “Sometimes, I want to escape and writing fantasy is that escape for me.

“Ultimately, I like to write fantasy because it opens a world of possibilities.”

Nunes, who graduates this week from the specialist co-op program in English with a minor in creative writing, says two professors from U of T Scarborough’s department of English had a profound impact on her: Associate Professor Karina Vernon, who nurtured her interpretation of course material; and Assistant Professor SJ Sindu, who helped her gain confidence while working on the novel.

“Being able to bounce certain ideas off her and get in-depth feedback was very valuable to me,” Nunes says of Sindu. “She had a huge influence on me.”

Nunes’s efforts to initiate conversations about equity and inclusion are shaped by her many volunteer and communications roles on campus and in the community. In 2017, Nunes began volunteering with the Imani Academic Mentorship Program, an initiative that helps Black youth in Scarborough pursue post-secondary education.

“This helped me decide the type of activist I wanted to be. It was a stepping stone to what I’m doing right now with my writing.”

As a co-op student, Nunes worked as an online projects co-ordinator to support the development of unconscious bias training modules – an equity and diversity initiative led by Maydianne Andrade, a professor in the department of biological sciences at U of T Scarborough. Nunes designed a series of web videos to provide a user-friendly experience for U of T staff and faculty to learn about how to spot unconscious bias in the workplace.

Nunes currently works in finance and continues her equity work part-time at the Federation of Black Canadians, a non-profit organization that works with community partners to advance the interests of Black communities across the country.

After juggling work and school throughout the pandemic, Nunes’s advice to students is to not allow grades to define your worth – and don’t compare yourself to others.

“Grades are one part of your time at university,” Nunes says. “Do a lot of self-searching and prioritize learning about who you are as a person.”

Books

U of T English prof's dystopian tale explores privilege and peril in the Global South

Robarts Library at 50: How Fort Book became the ‘campus living room’

New book by U of T law professor Kent Roach examines the injustice of wrongful convictions in Canada

Danny Ramadan is U of T Scarborough’s new writer-in-residence

With latest work, ���߲ݴ�ý grad challenges children's book genre

The Legal Singularity: U of T Law profs on how AI will make the law 'radically' better

With her debut novel a bestseller, U of T alumna Amita Parikh aims to help underrepresented writers

In his first novel, PhD candidate Dashiel Carrera explores 'what it means to reckon with memory'

Calling it a 'natural fit,' U of T librarian opts for familiar setting in debut mystery novel

'I'm not content with the world we live in': ���߲ݴ�ý grad uses fantasy genre to pursue real-life change

With latest work, ��߲ݴ�ý grad challenges children's book genre

'I'm not content with the world we live in': ��߲ݴ�ý grad uses fantasy genre to pursue real-life change