ASAC Publications

Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption by John McLeod (review)
By Margaret Homans
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 5, 2017
pp. 130-134
Click to read: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2017.0003
📸: Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

"This moving and informative renders an account of Maine’s Wabanaki -State Truth and Commission, convened in 2012, whose task was to investigate the treatment of Native American children in the state of Maine from 1978 to 2012, to write a report, and to make recommendations. The work of the Commission is interspersed with poignant accounts of the treatment of the now-adult children forcibly taken from their parents, and of the parents whose children had been devastatingly ripped from them. To contrast with this historical experience, the movie also pictures present-day Native American ceremonies with multigenerational participants—most movingly, toddlers learning dances and rituals from their grandparents. The makes obvious the brutal injustices of child removal, concluding as the Commission itself eventually does, that the white community perpetrated cultural genocide on the Native American community in this practice."
Dawnland by Adam Mazo and Ben Pender-Cudlip ( )
Martha Satz
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press on Project MUSE
Volume 8, Issue 1, 2020
pp. 119-121
Click to read: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2020.0015
📸: Jordan Wozniak on Unsplash

Interpersonal Communication
By Sara Docan-Morgan
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 4, 2014
pp. 98-102
The sources chosen for the Communication Studies portion of this bibliography represent an exciting, diverse, and emerging body of work. In this list, readers will find work that is quantitative and qualitative, covering both domestic and international. Despite this diversity, all selections reflect an orientation to the discipline of communication, which examines “how people use messages to generate meanings within and across various contexts, cultures, channels, and media” (National). Articles and chapters in this bibliography explore messages regarding , whether these are exchanged face-to-face or through a medium such as the Internet. All selections were authored by at least one researcher whose primary disciplinary identity, or “academic home,” is in Studies.
Click to read: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2014.0012
📸: Quino Al on Unsplash

“The Canadian government has agreed to pay more than $30 billion to compensate Indigenous children who were taken away from their families and put into the child welfare system.”

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/05/1070471306/canada-reaches-a-historic-deal-to-compensate-indigenous-children

Good companion read with many of the articles published in our first 2018 issue.

Canada reaches a historic deal to compensate Indigenous children The Canadian government has agreed to pay more than $30 billion to compensate Indigenous children who were taken away from their families and put into the child welfare system.

"In Search of Other Mother's Gardens: On Creative Kinships"
By Lisa Marie Brimmer
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 7, Issue 2, 2019
pp. 280-289
In Alice Walker's essay In Search of Our Mother's Gardens the womanist writer observes creativity's potential to repair the past. By exploring the pluralized impact of adoption and settler colonial nationalism on Black sociality, this essay exposes the creative kinships of Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Heidi Durrow, and Nella Larsen.
Click to read in full 👇
https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2019.0022
📸: Erda Estremera on Unsplash

Adoption and Multiculturalism: Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific ed. by Jenny Heijun Wills et al. (review)
Barbara Yngvesson
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 351-355
"The essays in this volume unpack the meanings of adoption as through a fine-grained examination of its contradictions in four Northwestern European settings (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Sweden), as well as in Canada and Australia. What does it mean, for example, that a country such as Denmark is simultaneously anti-immigrant and pro-adoption; that in Sweden, a nation that has been celebrated as the world's most antiracist and multiculturalist society, the racialized difference of adoptees "takes precedence despite their being culturally Swedish" (28); or that in Flanders, "a discourse of cultural incompatibility between 'real' Flemish culture and 'Muslim culture' in particular … uses non-European immigration as a substitute for the notion of race within a discourse that justifies xenophobia as human beings' 'natural' fear of differences" (199)?"
Click to continue reading: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0018

"White U***d Mother: The Adoption Mandate in Postwar Canada by Valerie J. Andrews (review)"
By Liz DeBetta
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 347-351
"This review addresses Valerie Andrews's book White U***d Mother: The Adoption Mandate in Postwar Canada. Andrews' account is both historical and scholarly and makes an important contribution to the field of critical adoption studies. This work offers readers insight into the social, legal, and historical precedents set in Canada in the years following World War Two that established modern practices and created a system of violence toward women. The book is an exploration of the way that adoption and should be linked in the about adoption and serves as a call to action for those who research and study adoption as a cultural phenomenon. This review evaluates the author's approach and her contribution to the field of adoption studies."
Click to read in full on Project MUSE
https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0017
📸: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

"Since its inception over fifteen years ago, the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC) has been bringing together humanities and social science scholars to create the interdisciplinary field of Critical Adoption Studies. Although she missed the inaugural conference in Tampa in 2005, Elizabeth Raleigh was first introduced to this organization at the Pittsburgh conference in 2007. Since then, she has been a steadfast attendee and participant. In many ways, her own scholarly trajectory grew in tandem with ASAC's. In this conversational , she reflects on the evolution of critical adoption studies and how it shaped her as an academic. Tackling questions such as the most productive lines of inquiry in adoption studies; the disciplinary and topical edges of the field; and the areas that are ripe for future research, in this short piece, Raleigh probes the paradoxes of adoptive and biogenetic connection."
"Reflections of an Adoptee Researcher: Elizabeth Raleigh's Musings on Critical Adoption Studies"
By Elizabeth Raleigh
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 341-346
Click to read in full:
https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0016
📸: Ümit Bulut on Unsplash

"As a Korean adoptee engaged in critical adoption studies , my personal perspectives and academic pursuits are inherently intertwined. Because I come from an interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies background, the scholars and writers who influence and inform my work are diverse in their perspectives, disciplines, and methodologies. In my own research, I draw from the creative voices of transracial adoptee writers, frameworks of gendered colonialism, the interdisciplinary field of Asian American Studies, and the emerging scholarship of Korean adoption studies. My academic engagement with these bodies of research and wisdom has led to not only clarity in my own research, but has contributed to defining my sense of self as a transracial, transnational adoptee."
"Points of Origin: Finding Self in Critical Adoption Studies Research"
By Kira Donnell
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 325-340
Click to read: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0015
📸: Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

"My study of forty-three published by people with the three closest relations to adoption shows some frequent patterns. Birth mothers didn't realize how hard it would be to deal with relinquishment, adoptive parents could have used more information, adoption agencies and professionals are often negligent or deceptive, most adoptees want to know more about their family history. These memoirs mostly support moving toward more openness and a more inclusive understanding of and . If their insights are taken seriously, the proportion of adoptions with greater degrees of openness is likely to increase in the future."
"Memoirs and the Future of Adoption"
By Marianne Novy
Adoption & Culture
The Ohio State University Press
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021
pp. 308-324
Click to read on Project MUSE: https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2021.0014
📸: Tom Hermans on Unsplash

Happy New Year to all our readers, contributors, and everyone who makes this journal possible! We can't wait to see what you create in #2022!