It’s Sunday night and I’m working on something that won’t get done until tomorrow…maybe. So, to keep my 2021 NAM record intact, I’m sending this conference announcement along: 10th Biennial Adoption Initiative Conference sponsored by St. John’s University and Montclair State University, for March 25-26, 2022.
It’s a tight timeframe for papers, (I must have missed the first round announcement) but maybe somebody will bite. The Call for papers is here.
Pop culture adoption wears me out. I enjoy academic approaches and have presented at scholarly-type conferences in the past. If I had the time I’d submit something, but then I’d have to stop what I’m doing and think about it. My 3 writing projects are more than I can handle at the moment to even think up a topic and write an abstract, much less a paper.
This session’s theme is The Evolution of Adoption Practice: Activist and Community Perspectives, relevant to Bastard Insurgency, grassroots organizing, us weaponizing our personal narratives, and a nice respite from social media adoption carping.
Possible topics Include but are not limited to the following:
- In what ways have first/birth families, adoptees, and adoptees’ communities of origin advocated for their needs over the past twenty years?
- Ways in which intercountry adoptees are changing the conversation around immigration and citizenship.
- New technologies and their impact on adoption search and reunion.
- Based on the historical perspectives of “best interests of the child,” what exactly does “best interest of the child” mean in 2020?
- How does adoption relate to or mimic imperialism, colonialism, and nation-state foreign policies?
- Aspects of privileges inherent in adoption as they are enacted in adoption practice and as they influence identity, citizenship, and being.
- Ways current adoption narratives include or leave out notions of land, place, history, ethnicity, and ability to belong and inform identity.
- Ways in which tools used to “deal with” adoption, including psychiatry and therapy, enforce dominant cultural myths about adoption.
- In what ways has the demand for “adoption competent” mental health practitioners by adoptees, birth/first families and adoptive parents changed the clinical paradigms and treatment modalities for individuals seeking counseling/therapy?
I know a lot of people believe that there’s not much “research” on adoption out there but there is. Some work is held hostage behind a paywall, but I’ve dug around and found a substantial amount of work available online and sometimes held in university libraries in hard copy
Adoption studies are cutting edge. The problem is that the adoption industry. politicians, do-good libs and progs, misogynist fetus- obsessive cons, white saviors, and Christo-fascists don’t care. It disturbs their mythology. Besides who, in post-literate America, wants to spend the time reading it? Same with “stakeholders” (I hate that word, but what else to call us?) who prefer to live in an echo chamber.
I really miss the old days before memes, Facebook, and Tik Tok controlled the discourse.
Thanks to Danaiel Drennan ElWar
Day 7of 30–
23 to go
