Download or read book Cultures of Transnational Adoption written by Toby Alice Volkman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-10 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1990s, the number of children adopted from poorer countries to the more affluent West grew exponentially. Close to 140,000 transnational adoptions occurred in the United States alone. While in an earlier era, adoption across borders was assumed to be straightforward—a child traveled to a new country and stayed there—by the late twentieth century, adoptees were expected to acquaint themselves with the countries of their birth and explore their multiple identities. Listservs, Web sites, and organizations creating international communities of adoptive parents and adoptees proliferated. With contributors including several adoptive parents, this unique collection looks at how transnational adoption creates and transforms cultures. The cultural experiences considered in this volume raise important questions about race and nation; about kinship, biology, and belonging; and about the politics of the sending and receiving nations. Several essayists explore the images and narratives related to transnational adoption. Others examine the recent preoccupation with “roots” and “birth cultures.” They describe a trip during which a group of Chilean adoptees and their Swedish parents traveled “home” to Chile, the “culture camps” attended by thousands of young-adult Korean adoptees whom South Korea is now eager to reclaim as “overseas Koreans,” and adopted children from China and their North American parents grappling with the question of what “Chinese” or “Chinese American” identity might mean. Essays on Korean birth mothers, Chinese parents who adopt children within China, and the circulation of children in Brazilian families reveal the complexities surrounding adoption within the so-called sending countries. Together, the contributors trace the new geographies of kinship and belonging created by transnational adoption. Contributors. Lisa Cartwright, Claudia Fonseca, Elizabeth Alice Honig, Kay Johnson, Laurel Kendall, Eleana Kim, Toby Alice Volkman, Barbara Yngvesson

Download or read book Adoption and Multiculturalism written by Jenny H Wills and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-09-04 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adoption and Multiculturalism features the voices of international scholars reflecting transnational and transracial adoption and its relationship to notions of multiculturalism. The essays trouble common understandings about who is being adopted, who is adopting, and where these acts are taking place, challenging in fascinating ways the tidy master narrative of saviorhood and the concept of a monolithic Western receiving nation. Too often the presumption is that the adoptive and receiving country is one that celebrates racial and ethnic diversity, thus making it superior to the conservative and insular places from which adoptees arrive. The volume’s contributors subvert the often simplistic ways that multiculturalism is linked to transnational and transracial adoption and reveal how troubling multiculturalism in fact can be. The contributors represent a wide range of disciplines, cultures, and connections in relation to the adoption constellation, bringing perspectives from Europe (including Scandinavia), Canada, the United States, and Australia. The book brings together the various methodologies of literary criticism, history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural theory to demonstrate the multifarious and robust ways that adoption and multiculturalism might be studied and considered. Edited by three transnational and transracial adoptees, Adoption and Multiculturalism: Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific offers bold new scholarship that revises popular notions of transracial and transnational adoption as practice and phenomenon.

Download or read book Transracial and Intercountry Adoptions written by Rowena Fong and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With essays by well-known adoption practitioners and researchers who source empirical research and practical knowledge, this volume addresses key developmental, cultural, health, and behavioral issues in the transracial and international adoption process and provides recommendations for avoiding fraud and techniques for navigating domestic and foreign adoption laws. The text details the history, policy, and service requirements relating to white, African American, Asian American, Latino and Mexican American, and Native American children and adoptive families. It addresses specific problems faced by adoptive families with children and youth from China, Russia, Ethiopia, India, Korea, and Guatemala, and offers targeted guidance on ethnic identity formation, trauma, mental health treatment, and the challenges of gay or lesbian adoptions

Download or read book The Best Possible Immigrants written by Rachel Rains Winslow and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rachel Rains Winslow examines how the adoption of foreign children transformed from a marginal activity in response to episodic crises in the 1940s to an enduring American institution by the 1970s. She provides the first historical examination of the people, policies, and systems that made the United States an enduring "adoption nation."

Download or read book Global Families written by Catherine Ceniza Choy and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last fifty years, transnational adoption—specifically, the adoption of Asian children—has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish. In Global Families, Catherine Ceniza Choy unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States. Beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia, she reveals how mixed-race children born of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen comprised one of the earliest groups of adoptive children. Based on extensive archival research, Global Families moves beyond one-dimensional portrayals of Asian international adoption as either a progressive form of U.S. multiculturalism or as an exploitative form of cultural and economic imperialism. Rather, Choy acknowledges the complexity of the phenomenon, illuminating both its radical possibilities of a world united across national, cultural, and racial divides through family formation and its strong potential for reinforcing the very racial and cultural hierarchies it sought to challenge.

Download or read book Transnational Adoption written by Sara K. Dorow and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an ethnographic study of China/U.S. adoption, the largest contemporary intercountry adoption program.

Download or read book Race in Transnational and Transracial Adoption written by Vilna Bashi Treitler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When parents form families by reaching across social barriers to adopt children, where and how does race enter the adoption process? How do agencies, parents, and the adopted children themselves deal with issues of difference in adoption? This volume engages writers from both sides of the Atlantic to take a close look at these issues.

Download or read book Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption written by Jessica Walton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the experiences of South Koreans adopted into Western families and the complexity of what it means to "feel identity" beyond what is written in official adoption files. Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption is based on ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and interviews with adult Korean adoptees from the United States, Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Sweden. It seeks to probe beneath the surface of what is "known" and examines identity as an embodied process of making that which is "unknown" into something that can be meaningfully grasped and felt. Furthermore, drawing on the author’s own experiences as a transnational, transracial Korean adoptee, this book analyses the racial and cultural negotiations of "whiteness" and "Korean-ness" in the lives of adoptees and the blurriness which results in-between. Highlighting the role of memory and the body in the formation of identities, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Korean Studies, Ethnicity Studies and Anthropology as well as Asian culture and society more generally.

Download or read book International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture written by Mark Shackleton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-06 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about transnational and transracial adoption in North American culture. It asks: to what extent does the process of international adoption reflect imperious inequalities around the world; or can international adoption and the personal experiences of international adoptees today be seen more positively as what has been called the richness of “adoptive being”? The areas covered include Native North American adoption policies and the responses of Native North American writers themselves to these policies of assimilation. This might be termed “adoption from within.” “Adoption from without” (transnational adoption) is primarily dealt with in articles discussing Chinese and Korean adoptions in the US. The third section concerns such issues as the multiple forms that adoption can take, notions of adoption and identity, adoption and the family, and the problems of adoption.

Download or read book Transnational Adoption written by Toby Alice Volkman and published by Social Text. This book was released on 2003 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experiences in this volume consider how trans-national adoption creates and transforms cultures, in the light of the vast increase in their number.

Download or read book The Kinning of Foreigners written by Signe Howell and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late nineteen sixties, transnational adoption has emerged as a global phenomenon. Due to a sharp decline in infants being made available for adoption locally, involuntarily childless couples in Western Europe and North America who wish to create a family, have to look to look to countries in the poor South and Eastern Europe. The purpose of this book is to locate transnational adoption within a broad context of contemporary Western life, especially values concerning family, children and meaningful relatedness, and to explore the many ambiguities and paradoxes that the practice entails. Based on empirical research from Norway, the author identifies three main themes for analysis: Firstly, by focusing on the perceived relationship between biology and sociality, she examines how notions of child, childhood and significant relatedness vary across time and space. She argues that through a process of kinning, persons are made into kin. In the case of adoption, kinning overcomes a dominant cultural emphasis placed upon biological connectedness. Secondly, it is a study of the rise of expert knowledge in the understanding of 'the best interest of the child', and how the part played by the 'psycho.technocrats' effects national and international policy and practice of transnational adoption. Thirdly, it shows how transnational adoption both depends upon and helps to foster the globalisation of Western rationality and morality. The book is an original contribution to the anthropological study of kinship and globalisation.

Download or read book Culture Keeping written by Heather Jacobson and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1990s, close to 250,000 children born abroad have been adopted into the United States. Nearly half of these children have come from China or Russia. Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference offers the first comparative analysis of these two popular adoption programs. Heather Jacobson examines these adoptions by focusing on a relatively new social phenomenon, the practice by international adoptive parents, mothers in particular, of incorporating aspects of their children's cultures of origin into their families' lives. "Culture keeping" is now standard in the adoption world, though few adoptive parents, the majority of whom are white and native-born, have experience with the ethnic practices of their children's homelands prior to adopting. Jacobson follows white adoptive mothers as they navigate culture keeping: from their motivations, to the pressures and constraints they face, to the content of their actual practices concerning names, food, toys, travel, cultural events, and communities of belonging. Through her interviews, she explores how women think about their children, their families, and themselves as mothers as they labor to construct or resist ethnic identities for their children, who may be perceived as birth children (because they are white) or who may be perceived as adopted (because of racial difference). The choices these women make about culture, Jacobson argues, offer a window into dominant ideas of race and the "American Family," and into how social differences are conceived and negotiated in the United States.

Download or read book Cross cultural Approaches to Adoption written by Fiona Bowie and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adoption is currently subject to a great deal of media scrutiny. High-profile cases of international adoption via the internet and other unofficial routes, have drawn attention to the relative ease with which children can be obtained on the global circuit, and have brought about legislation which regulates the exchange of children within and between countries. However a scarcity of research into cross-cultural attitudes to child-rearing, and a wider lack of awareness of cultural difference in adoptive contexts, has meant that the assumptions underlying Western childcare policy are seldom examined or made explicit. These articles look at adoption practices from Africa, Oceania, Asia and Central America, including examples of societies in which children are routinely separated from their biological parents or passed through several foster families. Showing the range and flexibility of the child-rearing practices that approximate to the Western term 'adoption', they demonstrate the benefits of a cross-cultural appreciation of family life, and allow a broader understanding of the varied relationships that exist between children and adoptive parents.

Download or read book Adopted Territory written by Eleana J. Kim and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ethnography examining the history of Korean adoption to West, the emergence of a distinctive adoptee collective identity, and adoptee returns to Korea in relation to South Korean modernity and globalization.

Download or read book Intercountry Adoption from China written by Jay W. Rojewski and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2001-06-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting with questions about how to incorporate Chinese culture and custom into the lives of their adopted daughters Emily and Claire, the authors began a year-long search for answers. The result is a detailed examination of the post-adoptive views, actions, and experiences of a national sample of families with children from China toward acknowledging their adopted child's Chinese cultural-heritage and the issues they face together as a multicultural family. Historical and present-day issues affecting intercountry adoptees and their families, such as arguments used to support or oppose intercountry and transracial adoption, developmental delay and the effects of institutionalization on Chinese adoptees, parent-child attachment, discrimination and racial prejudice, and identity development, are detailed. Parents' beliefs and experiences on these issues are supplemented by a multi-disciplined, comprehensive review of available literature. While occasionally relying on personal experiences, this book is not about the authors' personal adoption story and parenting experiences. Rather, the focus is on common experiences and reactions of adoptive families who were, for the most part, firmly ensconced in the cultural mainstream but now find themselves viewed differently by society; these parents find that issues of culture, race, and ethnicity have become an important part of their everyday lives. Adoption scholars and professionals, as well as adoptive parents, will benefit from reading Intercountry Adoption from China.

Download or read book Origin Narratives written by Macarena Garcia-Gonzalez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first of its kind, this volume unpacks the cultural construction of transnational adoption and migration by examining a sample of recent children’s books that address the subject. Of all European countries, Spain is the nation where immigration and transnational adoption have increased most steeply from the early 1990s onward. Origin Narratives: The Stories We Tell Children About Immigration and International Adoption sheds light on the way contemporary Spanish society and its institutions re-define national identity and the framework of cultural, political and ethnic values, by looking at how these ideas are being transmitted to younger generations negotiating a more heterogeneous environment. This study collates representations of diversity, migration, and (colonial) otherness in the texts, as well as their reception by the adult mediators, through reviews, paratexts, and opinions collected from interviews and participant observation. In this new work, author Macarena Garcia Gonzalez argues that many of the texts at the wider societal discourse of multiculturalism, which have been warped into a pedagogical synthesis, underwrite the very racism they seek to combat. Comparing transnational adoption with discourses about immigration works as a new approach to the question of multiculturalism and makes a valuable contribution to an array of disciplines.

Download or read book To Save the Children of Korea written by Arissa H Oh and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The important . . . largely unknown story of American adoption of Korean children since the Korean War . . . with remarkably extensive research and great verve.” —Charles K. Armstrong, Columbia University Arissa Oh argues that international adoption began in the aftermath of the Korean War. First established as an emergency measure through which to evacuate mixed-race “GI babies,” it became a mechanism through which the Korean government exported its unwanted children: the poor, the disabled, or those lacking Korean fathers. Focusing on the legal, social, and political systems at work, To Save the Children of Korea shows how the growth of Korean adoption from the 1950s to the 1980s occurred within the context of the neocolonial US-Korea relationship, and was facilitated by crucial congruencies in American and Korean racial thought, government policies, and nationalisms. Korean adoption served as a kind of template as international adoption began, in the late 1960s, to expand to new sending and receiving countries. Ultimately, Oh demonstrates that although Korea was not the first place that Americans adopted from internationally, it was the place where organized, systematic international adoption was born. “Absolutely fascinating.” —Giulia Miller, Times Higher Education “ Gracefully written. . . . Oh shows us how domestic politics and desires are intertwined with geopolitical relationships and aims.” —Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University “Poignant, wide-ranging analysis and research.” —Kevin Y. Kim, Canadian Journal of History “Illuminates how the spheres of ‘public’ and ‘private,’ ‘domestic’ and ‘political’ are deeply imbricated and complicate American ideologies about family, nation, and race.” —Kira A. Donnell, Adoption & Culture