Sonja van Wichelen over Legitimating Life

In this book launch, Sonja van Wichelen will be presenting from her new book Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology, which was published by Rutgers University Press this year. She will describe how contemporary justifications of cross-border adoption navigate between child welfare, humanitarianism, family making, capitalism, science, and health.

Focusing on contemporary institutional practices of adoption in the United States and the Netherlands, the book traces how professionals, bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, social workers, and experts legitimate a practice that became progressively controversial.

Throughout the past few decades transnational adoption transformed from a humanitarian response to a means of making family. In this new manifestation, life becomes necessarily economized. While push and pull factors, demand and supply dynamics, and competition between agencies set the stage for the globalization of adoption, international conventions, scientific knowledge, and the language of human rights universalized the phenomenon. Van Wichelen argues that such technoscientific legitimations of a globalizing practice are rearticulating colonial logics of race and civilization. Yet, she also lets us see beyond the biopolitical project and into alternative ways of making kin.

Sonja van Wichelen
Sonja van Wichelen is Associate Professor with the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney in Australia. Her research broadly engages with the body, law, and science in the age of globalization and the effects that changes in these areas have on our understanding of citizenship. She is the author of Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology (Rutgers, 2019), Religion, Gender and Politics in Indonesia: Disputing the Muslim Body (Routledge, 2010), and co-editor of Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Henny Bos
Henny Bos is professor of Sexual and Gender Diversity in Families and Youth at the University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. Henny Bos carries out research into same-sex parenting families and sexual minority youth. Bos is internationally known for her research on lesbian mother families in the U.S. and the Netherlands, and on gay father families, same-sex attracted and gender-nonconforming youth. In 2017 she was awarded the ‘Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award’ by the American Psychological Association’s (APA) division of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual Psychology.

In samenwerking met de AISSR.