Adoption Quarterly

Centering the Voices of Adult Adoptees and Adoptee-Directed Scholarship

Adoption Quarterly invites abstract submissions for a special issue focused on adult adoptees and adoptee-directed scholarship. We define adoptee-directed scholarship as scholarly works by authors who self-identify as adoptees and lead the research as first or sole authors. Adoption research has historically focused on child adoption practices, policies, and the psychological adjustment of children into adoptive homes. Thus, research on adoption has largely been produced about adoptees rather than by or with them and has often privileged the vantage points of adoptive parents, agencies, and helping professionals. This special issue seeks to expand the knowledge of adoption throughout the life course of adopted individuals and their families, focusing specifically on the impact of adoption in adulthood related to identity, relationships, health and psychological outcomes, aging, and social/community ties. The aim of this issue is to broaden and deepen the field's understanding of adoption by foregrounding adoptee epistemologies, voices, and scholarship and to demonstrate how adoptee-led inquiry advances the field’s methods, theory, ethics, and evidence base.

We invite submissions on topics including, but not limited to:

• Identity, search, and reunion - kinship, genealogy, DNA testing, records access, late-discovery experiences, and the meanings of origin.
• Intersectional experience - adoptee scholarship engaging disability, queerness, class, indigeneity, gender, and religion.
• Navigating relationships in adulthood - with adoptive parents and family, first/birth parents and family, intimate partnerships, parenting, communities.
• Accessing and utilizing adoption-specific services - counseling, peer-support, agency-based, mutual aid, traditional and non-traditional services focused on post-adoption for adult adoptees
• Reclaiming narrative - countering deficit framings; challenging redemption, gratitude, and “happy family” scripts; representation and voice.
• Methodological innovation - autoethnography and lived-experience methods; participatory and community-based research; reflexive and relational approaches to studying one’s own community.
• Research ethics - consent, harm, and reciprocity when researching adoption from within the adoption constellation; the ethics of extractive versus accountable scholarship.