{"id":218896,"date":"2024-09-25T18:06:08","date_gmt":"2024-09-25T22:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/inserra-chair\/?page_id=218896"},"modified":"2026-02-20T04:04:30","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T09:04:30","slug":"adoption-project","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/inserra-chair\/endowed-chair-research\/adoption-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Adoption Studies Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adoption is a topic that offers a unique window into issues of trauma, identity, belonging, mental health, and creativity with its inherent challenge of norms since it often connects different social backgrounds, if not distant cultures in the case of international adoptions, and provides – albeit in complicated forms – a place in lieu of abandonment and loss. Essentially, adoption is thus an act of translation. While often romanticized as part of a rescue rhetoric, adoption is also at the center of debates about the legitimacy of uprooting, as well as about the exploitation, marginalization, and crime that it directly and indirectly produces in the countries or social milieus of origin. International adoption is also an entry point into the history of struggling countries and the privileges of the so-called developed economies in a system of blatant inequalities of which adopted children are the most symptomatic manifestation. Yet, adoption is also a fruitful realm of creativity for authors and artists precisely because it prompts them to explore the tension between choice, chance, and circumstance in the encounter with the other; the conflict between and co-existence of nature and nurture; the impact of trauma (political events, natural disasters, and personal tragedies) in displacing and uniting people; and the fundamental need for telling one\u2019s story, which adoption naturally \u2026 fosters.<\/p>\n

The Adoption Studies Project explores all these clashing but also co-existing topics from a global cultural perspective in the belief that the humanities represent a key field to approach a topic normally relegated to psychology or sociology and the adoption experience is both universal and unique to specific locales around the world. The social sciences, as well as medicine, play an important role but it is the cultural production that sheds light on issues that while pertaining to the experience of adoption are ultimately human: the meaning of birth, the power of relations, the quest for the self, the management of rooted pain, the impact of standardized notions of a family, etc. I am interested in focusing on the Italian case as much as the vast context of transnational adoption that reflects global dynamics. So far, the project has entailed teaching, translation, book presentations, conference papers, cultural events, etc. Below is a list of the specific aspects of this ongoing project, which will include additional ones over time on a regular basis.<\/p>\n

TEACHING<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cNarrating Adoption: Choice, Chance and Circumstance\u201d – a class taught for the Honors Program in Fall 2023 (offered in 2025 as “The Meanings of Adoption”).<\/p>\n