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H2020Individual fellowship2016–2019

OriginStories · Chinese Heritage Tours and Adoptive Origin Stories: Towards a Transnational Adoptive Field

Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2016-09-01 → 2019-12-22
EU contribution
€260,930
Participants
2
Scheme
MSCA-IF

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Results in brief

Chinese Heritage Tours and Adoptive Origin Stories: Towards a Transnational Adoptive Field

"Despite growing academic interest, scholars still lack a cohesive perspective on what it means to ""be"" a transnational child today. By analyzing the family making processes entailed in the “heritage tours” that transnational adoptees and their families undertake in their “origin country”, the overarching objective of this project is to identify how ‘belonging’ is relationally and (trans)nationally constructed in adoptive transnational family-making processes. The first objective is to distinguish impending complications of adoptive family life, specifically those related with the (dis)connections surrounding the ‘birth context’ and to advocate for better transnational family-making practices by taking on account all the parties involved. The second objective is to work towards the construction of the new Transnational Adoptive Field model, intended to provide a comprehensive and cross-country comparative way to study transnational adoptive family-making processes. Preliminary results show that it was usually the adoptive parents who proposed the “heritage tours” or even initiated birth parent searches to know the truth about their children’s past and help gather identity information. Most of them did so for fear of their children having been trafficked and to make up for a pressing sense of “loss” they feared their children might have in the future. Generally, adoptive parents felt an unease with Chinese culture and procedures and therefore sourced out the birth searchers in China to those who presented themselves as experts in the field."

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

China became the largest source of adopted children worldwide since its Transnational Adoption Program in 1992.As adoptees are coming of age, some are interested in exploring their roots. Concurrently, as international adoptions come under the scrutiny of critical groups in sending and receiving countries, heritage tours have become a popular way to satisfy the needs of different actors involved: from adoptive families seeking the youths’ roots to economically minded tour operators and adoption agencies, to critical Western-based civil society groups who advocate psychological benefits for adoptees, such a resolution to their emotional befuddlement. Heritage tours are thus where transnational kinning practices are played out, different notions of belonging intersect, and broader state and organizational interests meet. Thus, these tours constitute the ideal case for studying the transnational family-making process from a truly transnational perspective. Through a detailed comparative study of how adopters and adoptees in Spain and the US-the countries with the largest number of Chinese adoptees-Chinese first parents, and Chinese and Western heritage tour agencies negotiate their different interests, my research will facilitate one of the first multi-sited and multi-actor perspectives on transnational kinning practices through transnational adoption. The study brings together recent literature on transnational families and transnational adoption and uses mixed methods from the social sciences and humanities to build a Transnational Adoptive Field approach intended to provide a comprehensive and cross-country comparative way to study transnational adoptive family-making processes and involves ethnographic fieldwork in three different countries, interviews with key stakeholders and narrative analysis. In a wider sense, this inquiry is a case through which we may scrutinize the shifting meanings that re-define familial and national belonging in today’s globalizing world

Original text from CORDIS.

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Data: CORDIS, © European Union