2026 Biennial Conference

The 2026 event will be the first time that ASAC has held its biennial conference outside of North America. We’re hosting the conference in the UK to mark the 100th anniversary of the Adoption of Children Act (1926) in England and Wales.

All across the world, the legislation concerning adoption is characterised by precepts and prohibitions that differently impact everyone involved in adoption constellations. Adoption law often maintains a fiction that adoption is a legal contract that entails consent, a fiction often at odds with realities and lived experience. Indeed, such laws may appear to prevent inequalities and harms when they merely hide or perpetuate them. For example, the 1926 Adoption Act prohibits ‘payment or any other award in consideration of the adoption’, although matters of financial inequality and incentivisation often play a part in unfamilying consanguineous kin. Likewise, these days the ‘rights balancing’ exercise which jurists must carry out when considering whether or not to make an adoption or placement order, draws upon various legal fictions (e.g., ‘as if born to’, ‘right to appeal’, ‘irrevocability’, ‘right to identity’) often involving conflicting definitions of welfare and whose rights are paramount. The conference invites explorations of crossovers between legal and other ways in which adoption has been arranged, maintained, and imagined.

At the 2026 conference, we will be exploring in an interdisciplinary mode not only cultural representations of adoption’s regulation worldwide but also the ways in which adoption legislation has shaped a wider cultural landscape of attitudes within which adoption remains problematically troped. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

• How have cultural representations contributed to the judicial constitution of adoption practices? 

• In what ways do adoption texts (cultural texts of any sort) call out and critique the proscriptions of adoption’s formalisation and its consequences? 

• What is at stake when representations of adoption challenge the formal or informal ordinances and directives, which usually license adoption’s narrative or aesthetic forms? 

• How does rule-breaking on the page, screen, stage, or in a musical composition, etc., call attention to the old rules of adoption’s enactment and/or imagine new ones? 

• In terms of achieving meaningful reform or redress, in what way are the arts and humanities better placed to be the catalyst for lasting changes? Are they?

• How might the ‘jurisliteratures’ of adoptee rights (relating to identity, kinship, contact, information, the avoidance of Othering, etc.) be better disseminated to those who have little knowledge of adoption’s effects and differences? 

• How do cultural texts inform or challenge public perceptions of the legality (formal or informal) of adoption? 

• How do representations of legality/illegality create adoption identities or adoption cultures? 

• How do competing legal or cultural practices shape adoption, gamete donation, surrogacy, and other forms of building families through reproduction?

• How have governments legislated the family, to include its containment and the forced separation of parents and children? What are the effects of this action as it appears in cultural documents that communicate this legislation?

• What is the history of the interaction between the law and adoption, geographically considered? How is it pictured/communicated?

• If we consider the development of adoption over a century of the practice, and the pre-history of the practice, how has the role of the law as well as formal or informal legal practices changed or remained?

This conference will include a combination of onsite at University of Leeds and live webinars. Most sessions will be in-person; only webinars will be available for remote participants. Modality preference should be indicated on your proposal. 

Please submit your materials online via Google form: https://forms.gle/pFn25DdgJ9zSRrEP9. You may submit an individual paper, pre-formed panel (3-4 presenters), or pre-formed roundtable (4 participants). All submissions require a brief biographical sketch (70-100 words) for each person. Individual submissions require a 150-200 word abstract. Roundtable submissions require a 200-250 word abstract. Panel submissions require a 200-word panel abstract and individual paper abstracts of 100-150 words. Please see the PDF for details of what is required. 

We also invite creative presentations (writing, film, drama, graphic arts, other media, etc.) of 10 minutes or fewer on the conference theme. Please send short samples of creative work along with a 1-page CV or resume and links if you are working in visual or multimedia, to conference@adoptionandculture.org with the subject ‘Creative Presentation’.