Mediating Discourses of Transnational Adoption

This project aims to investigate the discursive mediation of transnational adoption, which comprises a nexus of local and global practices which are mediated in, through and across talk, text and other modalities of discourse. For instance, a host of discourses and contingent practices of care and 'kinning' are heterogeneously assembled to 'translate' a child from one familial 'place' or nexus of practice in the world to another, crossing linguistic, sociocultural, kinship, racial, class and national boundaries in the process. The main issue in this project is with how the 'child-to-be-adopted' is figured as a quasi-object, and thus how its origin, identity and agency is performatively distributed across the social and discursive field. Analyses have been conducted of how prospective adoptive parents are represented in a Danish TV documentary series following five potential adopters. The concern is with how adopters publicly narrate their own personal experiences and problems with adopting their children, as well as how they construct their personal websites, network with others locally and internationally, orient to other 'sites' or sources of information, share advice and create 'public goods'.