Since the late nineteen sixties, transnational adoption has emerged as a global phenomenon. Due to a sharp decline in infants being made available for adoption locally, involuntarily childless couples in Western Europe and North America who wish to create a family, have to look to look to countries in the poor South and Eastern Europe. The purpose of this book is to locate transnational adoption within a broad context of contemporary Western life, especially values concerning family, children and meaningful relatedness, and to explore the many ambiguities and paradoxes that the practice entails. Based on empirical research from Norway, the author identifies three main themes for analysis: Firstly, by focusing on the perceived relationship between biology and sociality, she examines how notions of child, childhood and significant relatedness vary across time and space. She argues that through a process of kinning, persons are made into kin. In the case of adoption, kinning overcomes a dominant cultural emphasis placed upon biological connectedness. Secondly, it is a study of the rise of expert knowledge in the understanding of 'the best interest of the child', and how the part played by the 'psycho.technocrats' effects national and international policy and practice of transnational adoption. Thirdly, it shows how transnational adoption both depends upon and helps to foster the globalisation of Western rationality and morality. The book is an original contribution to the anthropological study of kinship and globalisation.

The academic disciplines of law and sociocultural anthropology have a long but at times contentious history of drawing on each other in order to study and understand law and human experience in its diverse manifestations. This volume provides an innovative and engaging format by giving established and emerging scholars from diverse jurisdictions the opportunity to discuss and reflect upon what they consider to be a ‘leading work’. The collection offers a unique, multi-perspectival reconsideration of the intellectual history of the field whilst also addressing issues that are at the core of interdisciplinary legal research. Contributions shed light on the changing nature of cross-disciplinary research and collaboration, trace how disciplinary understandings of normativity have cross-fertilised each other, and reflect on choices taken within research on law and anthropology along a continuum of theoretical reflection, critique, engagement, and practical application. The book elaborates on the nature and the boundaries of law and anthropology research, as well as on its likely future development in light of the insights shared by contributors on their chosen leading works. The book will make fascinating reading for researchers and academics in both law and anthropology. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Adoption and surrogate pregnancy are the two most realistic options currently available for millions of couples unable to have biological children. In the past decade, international adoption has become popular among those who wish to avoid the wait associated with adopting domestically. Yet because of unique political, economic, and cultural circumstances within individual countries, international adoption is fraught with legal controversies and difficulties. Surrogate pregnancy is a relatively new and inherently complicated alternative. With few regulations to guide the process and protect those involved, however, countries struggle to address its ethical and moral questions, in addition to the legal, political, cultural, and environmental ramifications. Providing a historic overview and defining the key issues, Adoption and Surrogate Pregnancy examines the laws related to adoption and surrogate pregnancy in five countries: the United States, China, India, the United Kingdom, and Guatemala. The discussion covers the ways in which adoption and surrogate pregnancy overlap and influence each other, the nuances that further complicate matters, and the controversies surrounding both issues—such as fears of exploitation, class discrimination, socially "unwanted" children, same-sex parenthood, and the difficulties of governing the family unit. Allowing students to compare the subjects from the perspectives of different countries and cultures, this balanced and objective volume sheds light on the way these issues affect the global community.

This revised and expanded second edition of Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies provides a comprehensive basis for understanding the complexity and patterns of international migration. Despite increased efforts to limit its size and consequences, migration has wide-ranging impacts upon social, environmental, economic, political and cultural life in countries of origin and settlement. Such transformations impact not only those who are migrating, but those who are left behind, as well as those who live in the areas where migrants settle. Featuring forty-six essays written by leading international and multidisciplinary scholars, this new edition showcases evolving research and theorizing around refugees and forced migrants, new migration paths through Central Asia and the Middle East, the condition of statelessness and South to South migration. New chapters also address immigrant labor and entrepreneurship, skilled migration, ethnic succession, contract labor and informal economies. Uniquely among texts in the subject area, the Handbook provides a six-chapter compendium of methodologies for studying international migration and its impacts. Written in a clear and direct style, this Handbook offers a contemporary integrated resource for students and scholars from the perspectives of social science, humanities, journalism and other disciplines.

This revised and expanded second edition of Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies provides a comprehensive basis for understanding the complexity and patterns of international migration. Despite increased efforts to limit its size and consequences, migration has wide-ranging impacts upon social, environmental, economic, political and cultural life in countries of origin and settlement. Such transformations impact not only those who are migrating, but those who are left behind, as well as those who live in the areas where migrants settle. Featuring forty-six essays written by leading international and multidisciplinary scholars, this new edition showcases evolving research and theorizing around refugees and forced migrants, new migration paths through Central Asia and the Middle East, the condition of statelessness and South to South migration. New chapters also address immigrant labor and entrepreneurship, skilled migration, ethnic succession, contract labor and informal economies. Uniquely among texts in the subject area, the Handbook provides a six-chapter compendium of methodologies for studying international migration and its impacts. Written in a clear and direct style, this Handbook offers a contemporary integrated resource for students and scholars from the perspectives of social science, humanities, journalism and other disciplines.

In the past two decades, transnational adoption has exploded in scope and significance, growing up along increasingly globalized economic relations and the development and improvement of reproductive technologies. A complex and understudied system, transnational adoption opens a window onto the relations between nations, the inequalities of the rich and the poor, and the history of race and racialization, Transnational adoption has been marked by the geographies of unequal power, as children move from poorer countries and families to wealthier ones, yet little work has been done to synthesize its complex and sometimes contradictory effects. Rather than focusing only on the United States, as much previous work on the topic does, International Adoption considers the perspectives of a number of sending countries as well as other receiving countries, particularly in Europe. The book also reminds us that the U.S. also sends children into international adoptions—particularly children of color. The book thus complicates the standard scholarly treatment of the subject, which tends to focus on the tensions between those who argue that transnational adoption is an outgrowth of American wealth, power, and military might (as well as a rejection of adoption from domestic foster care) and those who maintain that it is about a desire to help children in need.

Since 2004, the number of international adoptions in the United States has declined by more than seventy percent. In The End of International Adoption? Estye Fenton studies parents in the United States who adopted internationally in the past decade during this shift. She investigates the experiences of a cohort of adoptive mothers who were forced to negotiate their desire to be parents in the context of a growing societal awareness of international adoption as a flawed reproductive marketplace. Many parents, activists, and scholars have questioned whether the inequality inherent in international adoption renders the entire system suspect. In the face of such concerns, international adoption has not only become more difficult, but also more politically and ethically fraught. The mothers interviewed for this book found themselves navigating contemporary American family life in an unexpected way, caught between the double-bind of work-family life and a new paradigm of thinking about the method—international adoption—that they used to create those families.

During the last two decades, a new form of trade in commercial surrogacy grew across Asia. Starting in India, a “disruptive” model of surrogacy offered mass availability, rapid accessibility, and created new demands for surrogacy services from people who could not afford or access surrogacy elsewhere. In International Surrogacy as Disruptive Industry in Southeast Asia, Andrea Whittaker traces the development of this industry and its movement across Southeast Asia following a sequence of governmental bans in India, Nepal, Thailand, and Cambodia. Through a case study of the industry in Thailand, the book offers a nuanced and sympathetic examination of the industry from the perspectives of the people involved in it: surrogates, intended parents, and facilitators. The industry offers intended parents the opportunity to form much desired families, but also creates vulnerabilities for all people involved. These vulnerabilities became evident in cases of trafficking, exploitation, and criminality that emerged in southeast Asia, leading to greater scrutiny on the industry as a whole. Yet the trade continues in new flexible hybrid forms, involving the circulation of reproductive gametes, embryos, surrogates, and ova donors across international borders to circumvent regulations. The book demonstrates the need for new forms of regulation to protect those involved in international surrogacy arrangements.

This book is a critical study of international adoption in Sweden, based on analysis of adoption-related texts, images and videos. The author argues that representations of adoption, and specifically of the bodies of international, transracial adoptees, are used to create and sustain myths of Swedish exceptionalism, concealing the nation’s colonial, racist and eugenic histories. The book challenges the virtuous perception of international adoption, and exposes and critiques the underlying racism and violence of both the adoption industry and the shaping of Sweden as a ‘good’ nation. It will appeal to students and scholars of adoption and migration, as well as those engaged in anti-racism research.

The compelling story of Hungarian children living with Belgian families during the interwar period Children who migrated without their families were noteworthy participants of interwar European migration history. Milk Sauce and Paprika tells the story of Hungarian children who were sent to Belgium in the framework of a humanitarian project between 1923 and 1927. Based on a wide variety of sources such as official documents, contemporary newspapers, photographs, family correspondences, biographies and interviews, this book examines the history of the Belgian-Hungarian child relief project and describes its social and cultural impacts on the families involved in both countries. This compelling story of one of the first mass European child migration movements offers new insights in the dynamics of national and religious communities. Furthermore, it sheds light on intimate family life and contemporary habits and values regarding parenting and co-parenting in the interwar period. Cutting across national and cultural borders, this monograph connects individual and collective memory with the experiences of childhood and migration.