Adoption Research Seminar
Perspectives on local and intercountry adoption: Canada, US and Australia
Friday 12 June 2009
10.00-3.30 pm
Location:
Room 5.29, 115 Victoria Pde, Fitzroy
Australian Catholic University -
Melbourne City Campus
To accompany the AVI and ICASN sponsored Festival of Films by Intercountry Adoptees on Saturday 13 June, researchers from the Australian Research Council funded The Search for Family: A History of Adoption in Australia are pleased to convene a seminar and roundtable discussion on adoption, and delighted to welcome Dr Karen Balcom, from McMaster University in Canada, as the lead speaker.
Seminar Program
10.15 – 11.00: The US Enacts the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption: One Year In
Karen Balcom, McMaster University, Canada
The Hague Convention is the central international mechanism for the regulation of transnational adoption. Although the Convention was established in 1993, it was only in 2008 that the United States – the world's largest receiving country and a significant sending country in transnational adoption -- activated its Hague regulatory process. In this presentation, an historian of adoption in the United States places the Hague Convention in historical context, and discusses current challenges and issues to watch for as the Hague system in enacted in the US.
11.15 – 12.00: What shall we do with ‘poor little Chinky’? Race and adoption in Australia between the wars.
Shurlee Swain, Australian Catholic University
This paper will examine attitudes to race in interwar adoption when adoptive parents were in short supply. It argues that while non-white children were not explicitly excluded from adoptive placement, there was no expectation that they would be acceptable to Anglo-Australians who were assumed to want a child who could have been born as their own.
12.15 – 1.00: How can adoption be so bad for Australian children, yet so good for children born overseas?
Denise Cuthbert, Monash University
As reported in two significant reports of the House of Representative Standing Committee on Family and Human Services in 2005 and 2007, there is an entrenched ‘anti-adoption’ culture in Australia and, in particular, in the children’s services bureaucracies of state and territory governments. While domestic adoption appears to be the ‘poor relation’ of child protection and welfare policy, demand for intercountry adoption continues to exceed supply. In this paper, I turn to some aspects of the divergent histories of intercountry adoption and domestic adoption in Australia in an attempt to unravel contradictions in views and attitudes to adoption and its outcomes in its domestic and intercountry forms.
Afternoon session 2.15 – 3.30: Adoption Research Roundtable: Karen Balcom will initiate the roundtable with an overview of current and emerging trends in adoption research in Canada and the US. Denise Cuthbert will respond with Australian perspectives, to be followed by open discussion.
Please register intentions to attend this event with Amy Pollard: Amy.Pollard@arts.monash.edu.au
Intercountry Adoption Film Festival and Seminar flyer (PDF)
This seminar & roundtable event is supported by the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University and the Australian Catholic University