Over the last 10 years, the number of adoptions of foreign-born children completed by American parents has increased tenfold over a wide number of countries, to the point where such adoptions number over 20,000 foreign-born children each year. Prospective parents tend to be racially white, professional class, and wealthier than average. This project is designed to answer two research questions regarding this surging phenomenon. The first is: How do agents adopting American parents and international adoption agencies make decisions about how they racially identify foreign born adopted children and racially represent the nations from which the children come? The answer is not predictable from the large and growing literature on what has been variously called racial formation, racialization, and ethnoracial assignment. These writings reinforce the idea that race is a system constructed on a premise that some people are more deserving of privilege and preference than others, but they also suggest that racial advantage and disadvantage is not doled out in a manner fixed for all time. Racial privilege, instead, evolves with changing political and economic circumstances. Much of this work is historically based, using legal and historical analysis to re-tell the story of this historical change over time. The project differs in that it attempts to capture a contemporary and ongoing racialization process. A second question asks: What is the relationship between gender and race in the international adoption process? This search for the foreign-born can be said to be racially motivated, as scholars have suggested that American race and class dynamics have created a "shortage" of desirable
This project studies a more contemporary manifestation of the racial assignment process by looking at the ways agents involved in placing foreign-born children in American homes construct those children's races, and help to set their racial identities, and to examine the relationship between gender and race in these processes. The principal investigator will use qualitative research methods to study the racial assigning processes in three sites in which they occur. The first site focuses on adoption agencies' representations, via a content analysis of the print materials they provide to prospective parents, and through their websites. A second site of research examines the growing cultural dialog on international adoption as expressed in advice books on "how to" undertake an intercountry adoption, raise a child different from oneself, and ensure your child learns his/her "culture." There is also a nascent but expanding children's literature on international adoption meant to comfort children who are foreign-born and/or explain the adoption to them as they grow. The PI will use content analysis in order to examine how print and visual media and other sites for advice in international adoptive childrearing (e.g. cultural camps) contribute to or hope to influence the racialization of these children. Finally, the PI will interview parents who have adopted foreign-born children to understand parents' thoughts and processes about the (inter-) racial aspects of international adoption, and learn about their practices in raising their foreign-born child. The broader impacts of this work include training undergraduate and graduate students. Results will be disseminated widely and the data will be made available to other researchers interested in replication and reanalysis. This data availability contributes to strengthening qualitative research methods.
