Call for Papers
European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference (EASA)
Panel: Exploring change and continuity: readjustment, identity and child mobility in an interconnected world.
Convenors
Jorge Grau Rebollo (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) email
Julia Vich Bertran (Maastricht University) email
Short Abstract
This panel aims to analyze old and new forms of child mobility (International adoption, informal circulation…) in today’s interconnected world. We will discuss case studies that pose intellectual and political challenges concerning readjustment and the re-shaping of identities at different levels.
Long Abstract
Within the last decades, International Adoption has become a major issue in academic and political agendas. Not only due to the increasingly numbers of formalized adoption transfers between different countries, but also because of related geopolitical, intellectual and ethical implications. Thus, Transnational Adoptive Programs (TAPs) should not be analyzed just as linear chains that transfer children from a sending country to a receiving one, while transferring ideas/economic resources in the other direction as Howell (2006) proposes. Rather, specific sets of meanings, material and affective resources, and social practices circulate in both directions between sending and receiving countries, generating social and cultural change. This ongoing process of mutual readjustment does not just impact on particular individuals, but has much wider social and cultural repercussions such as the unique net of socio-cultural constructions that shape, consolidate, promote and transform a concrete TAP, or the impact that all those images have on the identity formation of young adoptees (Vich-Bertran, 2010).
This panel wishes to debate such connections, challenges and innovative ways by addressing questions as the role of representation and new digital media in conforming extended communities, Internet-based dual / group communication facilitating contacts over the distance, or the centrality of child mobility as a part of transnational relationships between countries and individuals.
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