Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - OriginStories (Chinese Heritage Tours and Adoptive Origin Stories: Towards a Transnational Adoptive Field)

Teaser

\"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...

Summary

\"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.\"

Work performed

In order to achieve these objectives, Dr. Vich-Bertran produced and submitted three articles to international peer-reviewed journals and worked on the successful application of a workshop grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, a prestigious funding institution for international anthropological research throughout the world. She was awarded a grant for organizing and hosting a two-day workshop to advance innovative anthropological research on what it means to be a transnational child today. The workshop was designed to bring together top international scholars who study different kinds of child transnational journeys that so far have been treated in isolation from one another. This allows for a better understanding of how transnational children create relatedness, think of belonging, and experience governance in contemporary multicultural societies. Moreover, Dr. Vich-Bertran was accepted to present in two American Anthropologist Association Meetings, the top international meeting in her field. The first was in 2017 (“Renouncing to Kin: Stratified Reproduction, Capital and Inequality in China”) and the second in 2018 (“Local Government, International Organizations and China’s Unregulated Social Sector: Managing Trust, Face and Loss of Autonomy at the Shen Home Orphanage”.)

Final results

By giving voice to every actor involved, this project will contribute towards pointing more ethical ways of globally assembling, disassembling and reassembling families with due respect to the rights and welfare of all parties concerned. In a wider societal impact, this inquiry into transnational adoption family-making is a case through which we may scrutinize the shifting meanings that re-define familial and national belonging in today’s globalizing world.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/globalisation-transnationalism-and-development.