Chinese Heritage Tours and Adoptive Origin Stories: Towards a Transnational Adoptive Field

Información del proyecto

OriginStories

Identificador del acuerdo de subvención: 660776

DOI

10.3030/660776

Proyecto finalizado el 5 Diciembre 2018

Fecha de la firma de la CE 9 Noviembre 2015

Fecha de inicio 1 Septiembre 2016

Fecha de finalización 22 Diciembre 2019

Financiado con arreglo a

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Coste total

€ 260 929,80

Aportación de la UE

€ 260 929,80

Coordinado por

UNIVERSITEIT MAASTRICHT
Netherlands

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

Período documentado: 2016-09-01 hasta 2018-08-31

Resumen del contexto y de los objetivos generales del proyecto

"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."

Trabajo realizado desde el comienzo del proyecto hasta el final del período abarcado por el informe y los principales resultados hasta la fecha

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”.)

Avances que van más allá del estado de la técnica e impacto potencial esperado (incluida la repercusión socioeconómica y las implicaciones sociales más amplias del proyecto hasta la fecha)

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.

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