Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture Conference 2012: Call for Papers

sFor our 2012 conference, we are expanding our concerns to include not only adoption in its many historical and cultural variations but also parallel institutions such as foster care, orphanages, and technologically-assisted reproduction, as well as various forms of forced relinquishment or family separation. We seek proposals that explore the cultural meanings and/or political locations of any of these practices, and we encourage analyses of relationships among them. We will include academic work from a wide range of scholarly disciplines and areas—literature, film and popular culture and performance studies, cultural studies, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, law, women’s and gender studies, etc.—as well as artistic presentations of film, creative writing, graphic art, music, or productions in other media. We also encourage interdisciplinary panels, presentations, and productions.
Proposals may address adoption or related practices or their representation in any way, but we especially encourage work addressing race, class, gender, nationality, and/or sexuality and sexual orientation, and/or investigations of topics such as state and institutional power, (in)fertility, markets and market practices, and incarceration.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Catherine Ceniza Choy, Associate Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, University of California, Berkeley, whose forthcoming book, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America, examines how Asian international adoption has contributed to the transformation of the U.S. into an international adoption nation and how its history is also a history of race, labor, immigration and intimacy.

Dan Chaon, adoptee, writer, and Irvin E. Houck Associate Professor of the Humanities at Oberlin College, whose first novel, You Remind Me of Me, and most recent novel, national bestseller Await Your Reply, address themes of adoption. Await Your Reply was named one of the ten best books of the year by Publisher’s Weekly, The New York Times, and other publications.

NOTE: I attended a lecture by Catherine Ceniza Choy last year at Ohio State, and blogged about it here. She is doing very important work on the history of international adoption. Dan Chaon ,of course, the Bastard Poet Laureate of Ohio. I Last wrote about him here.