The 2016 ASAC conference offered many opportunities to learn about the exciting ways adoptees, adoptive parents, and biological parents are using blogs, memoirs, social networking, and storytelling to redefine the themes and questions that inform adoption studies. Panels also incorporated the work of activists, adoption practitioners, and scholars from multiple disciplines (many of whom also have a personal connection to adoption) who are tackling contemporary issues of adoption through explorations of subjects including disability, infertility, and surrogacy; which suggests important topics that warrant further consideration. Likewise, a number of presentations demonstrated why it is still important to evaluate anew the historical contexts in which transracial and transnational adoption schemes began and how and why these practices have evolved. While taking part in the Archival Adoption Research Roundtable that highlighted the incredible staff and collections of the Social Welfare History Archives (which houses the records of several organizations that played key roles in the development of U.S. and international adoption), I was reminded of how important this type of integrated approach is. Hearing people describe the new questions they are investigating using evidence including archival sources, oral interviews, literature, art, and media to better understand or explain complicated aspects of adoption, confirmed my belief that the work featured at ASAC conferences will continue to transform how we think about the representations, practice, and study of adoption.

Kori Graves 2016 ASAC Report

The 2016 ASAC Conference theme Building Communities, Changing Discourses truly fostered an interdisciplinary environment in which academics, practitioners, and artists could critically reflect upon some of the most pressing issues in the field of Adoption Studies today. In so doing, the theme of “changing discourses” applies both to the varying identities that we embody in these spaces (scholar, artist, adoptee, adoptive parent, birth parent, etc.) and the methodologies and frameworks for thinking about adoption as a dynamic and situated practice.

In the panel titled “Operating at the Intersections of Adoption Studies,” presenters demonstrated the ways in which interdisciplinary conversations can shape the discourses and study of adoption. For example, as Liz Raleigh used sociological data to show how international adoption has declined in the last decade, Jae Ran Kim observed that within the field of Social Work, there has been a dearth of research on adult adoptees. This suggests an area of growth for adoption researchers in both fields, from a framework disproportionately focused on child welfare to a broader consideration of adoption throughout the life course. Kim’s work also considers the field of Social Work’s focus on psychological aspects of adoption rather than discourses of race, gender, and culture. As such, Kit Myers’s theorization within Ethnic Studies of what he names the “violence of love” engages precisely with these questions of race, gender, and power. Myers suggests that power and loss is not simply an effect within adoptive practices but rather is inherent to the historical, affective, and relational processes of adoption.

In the Plenary/Keynote session featuring Deann Borshay Liem’s screening of her current workin-progress, the film Geographies of Kinship provided a rich engagement with the media studies and visual culture of transnational adoption. The film contextualizes the history of transnational adoption from Korea, beginning with the direct wake of the Korean War and following the industrialization of South Korea. In connecting the industrialization of South Korea and the development of a distinct South Korean racial identity, Geographies of Kinship situates the figure of the Korean transnational adoptee, not only within a global history of the United States and South Korea, but also within the racial formation of the modern Korean subject. At the same time, the film interweaves this history with the narratives and voices of Korean transnational adoptees. Like Borshay Liem’s other films, Geographies of Kinship contributes to the unique intersection of visual media serving to both represent transnational adoption within its historical dynamics of power as well as exemplify forms of cultural production created by adoptee artists.

As the field of Adoption Studies continues to flourish, ASAC remains a significant and generative intellectual space that approaches questions of culture, positionality, and power in critical ways. As a Chinese adoptee and graduate student in the field of Ethnic Studies, I am also personally excited to see the areas of critical inquiry expanding to include emerging topics of relevance such China’s changing One Child Policy, neoliberalism, and transnationalism. In the current U.S. political moment, in which issues of racial difference, international relations, and the impact of U.S. global power are as significant as ever, ASAC continues to be an important space of collaboration for us to have these rigorous and pressing conversations.

Lili Johnson 2016 ASAC Report

Within the context of philosophy, it has been my experience that the topic of adoption is often suspect because my discipline mainly regards the family to be the subject of psychology, the social sciences, or social work. As a result, I enjoy few opportunities to surround myself with people who think a lot and critically about adoption. This and the fact that ASAC is a venue for interdisciplinary and intersectional discussion and debate about all aspects of adoption with so many interesting and inspiring people is what inevitably makes this conference my all-time favorite!

Frances Latchford 2016 ASAC Report

The 2016 ASAC conference, centering around the theme Building Communities, Changing Discourses, invited attendees to think deeply about various acts of care: key concepts relating to adoption and the provision of care, the politics and geographies of care, and scholarly care in the act of researching and writing.

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In all, conference attendees reiterated the message that adoption, and our work on it, is a profoundly relational act. In future years, we might consider engaging with the growing literature on the ethics of care to think not just about the nature of kinship but also about intimate dependencies and inter-dependencies, the performance of caregiving itself, the types of bodies that are cared for, and how we, as scholars/writers/activists should think and act purposefully and reflectively as interpreters of these dynamics.

Sandy Sufian 2016 ASAC Report