In the past two decades, the study of adoption and culture has developed rapidly as a scholarly publishing field in the humanities and social sciences. An interdisciplinary series, Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture seeks to foster and accelerate this growth by gathering diverse works in one place for heightened visibility and more centralized interactions. The series welcomes scholarship across various disciplines that have a stake in using a variety of theoretical approaches that scholars have brought to studies of kinship—including trauma and affect, critical race studies, queer kinship, women’s studies, literary close readings, and archival research in the United States, Canada, Korea, and Germany.

The series encourages critical engagement with all aspects of nonnormative kinship—such as adoption, foster care, IVF, surrogacy, and gamete transfers—and approaches that critically examine such central features of human existence as race, identity, heritage, nationality, sexuality, and gender. Welcoming work from an array of disciplines—including history, literary criticism, ethnography, philosophy, and political and legal theory—books in the series will explore how these constructions affect not only those personally involved but also, more broadly, public understandings of identity, personhood, migration, kinship, and the politics of family.

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Adoption & Culture publishes essays on any aspect of adoption’s intersection with culture, including but not limited to scholarly examinations of adoption practice, law, art, literature, ethics, science, life experiences, film, or any other popular or academic representation of adoption. Adoption & Culture accepts submissions of previously unpublished essays for review.

Subscription to the journal confers membership in the Alliance.