Conference Reports

I recently attended the 2^nd International Conference on Adoption Research (ICAR2), held at the University of East Anglia in the beautiful town of Norwich, England. ICAR2 (the first International Conference on International Adoption was held in 1999 at the University of Minnesota), attracted over 150 delegates from around the world, including participants from Europe, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, South Korea, Nepal, New Zealand, Romania, UK, and the U.S., with two-thirds from the UK and the U.S.  A large number of the participants were entry-level assistant professors or graduate students finishing their doctorates. The overwhelming majority of participants came from the social sciences, mostly psychologists, social workers, demographers, and adoption and family researchers.

The conference program was shared between keynoters, concurrent panel sessions, and poster symposia.  For three days participants feasted on a host of intellectual stimulating papers presented in the concurrent sessions. The panels, all Power Point presentations, included adoptees’ experiences in transnational adoption; adolescents’ searching for biological and ethnic origins; adopted adults’ contesting Swedish adoption narratives, the current demographic dimensions of international adoption; the causes of international adoption in France; transracial representations of adoptees in the American and Canadian medias; longitudinal perspectives of families with adopted children with intellectual disabilities; Australian birth mothers’ experiences of relinquishing their babies in open adoptions; and a qualitative analysis of becoming an adoptive parent in intercountry adoptions. The posters packed an enormous amount of information in a compact space while allowing the presenters to discuss their research in an informal setting. It was an effective forum in which to network and to present research.

The opening address Monday evening by David Howe (University of East Anglia) in Norwich Cathedral, the second largest cathedral in England behind St. Paul’s in London, recognized the important role adoption played in both the sciences and humanities.  The next three days were followed by talks from keynote speakers Jesus Palacios (University of Seville) on the ecology of adoption; Sir Michael Rutter (London University) on the huge improvement in psychological functioning after early institutional deprivation of Romanian adoptees adopted within the UK; Harold D. Grotevant on the importance of the adoptive kinship network; Ruth G. McCoy (University of Texas at Austin) on the success of the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act in reducing America’s huge foster care population and increasing adoptive placements; Miriam Steele (New School for Social Research) on attachment representations and adoption outcome on children who had been maltreated;  and Elsbeth Neil (University of East Anglia) on what adoptive parents think and feel about post-adoption contact and how this affects children’s development; and by E. Wayne Carp (Pacific Lutheran University) on the evolution of the early history of openness and secrecy of adoption records in three English-speaking countries: the United States, England, and New Zealand. 

Social activities were not neglected. On one afternoon when the panels ended early, participants could choose between a river boat trip and dinner through the historic heart of Norwich and out to the rural tranquility of Surlingham Broad; a guided tour and dinner of early seventeenth-century Blickling Hall, a historic English mansion (dinner was at the Buckinghamshire Arms pub); and my choice, on the hottest day in English history: a visit to Cromer, a traditional English seaside resort town where our group ate the recommended fish and chips dinner at the renowned “Mary Jane’s.” Dr. Beth Neil of UEA handled the immense and complicated organizational details with dispatch and remarkable good cheer. Many of the best papers will be published in a special double issue of Adoption Quarterly; a book containing the keynote papers will be published by the Haworth Press.

 

Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Sarah Lawrence College, June 29 to July 2, 2006
Kathleen W. Jones

 The history of childhood was represented in two of the fifteen sessions at this year’s Cheiron meeting.  The symposium “Beyond the Blank Slate: Episodes in the Scientific Study of  ‘Nurture’ in Twentieth-Century Psychology” featured papers by Ellen Herman (“Nurture and its Limits: The Case of Child Adoption), Jenna St. Martin and Jill Morawski (“Mental Health, Moral Health, and the “Other”: Studies of Soviet Socialization, 1946-1970”) and Carrie Eisert (“Communists, Homosexuals and Housewives: The Specter of the Momistic Threat in the U.S., 1942-1960).  Adoption was a practice deeply committed to the power of nurture in shaping human lives, yet, as Herman described, one feature of adoption, “telling” or the practice of informing children about their adoptive status, was a significant reminder that “nature” was never far from the thoughts of those who constructed adoption policies and programs.  St. Martin and Morawski discussed the theories behind the concept of socialization and suggested that US researchers examined Soviet practices in order to better understand the relationship between the individual and the social in the formation of an American “character.”  According to Eisner, the powerful and destructive actions of “mom,” the nemesis of post World War II theories of child development, were predicated on ideas about the importance of nurture or environmental influences in the child rearing process.  Momism, she argued, was a threat to national security, destructive of individual male personalities, and damned the next generation of mothers to repeat the destructive practices.  The presenters concluded that in the nature-nurture debate neither side adopted pure lines of reasoning and each borrowed from the other when necessary. In addition to the three papers in the nurture symposium, Stephen Berger, as part of a panel on “Post World War Two and the Science of Race Relations,” discussed the American Youth Commission, a Rockefeller Foundation program from the 1930s whose researchers studied the effects of minority status on the personality of black children (the argument used so effectively in the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.) 

Cheiron meets annually in June and invites papers about the history of any social science discipline;  most presentations focus on some aspect of the history of psychology, loosely construed.  Next year’s meeting will be in Dublin, Ireland.

Australian Historical Association 2006 Biennial Conference “Genres of History”, Canberra, July 3-7
Shurlee Swain, Australian Catholic University

Given that one of the themes of the recent Australian Historical Association Conference was institutional abuse, it is perhaps not surprising that children featured most prominently in the papers presented as residents, inmates or pupils rather than as members of families. The one exception was the paper by John Bourke and Rosemary Lucadou Wells that discussed Jim Everett’s stories of his Tasmanian Aboriginal childhood. The fate of children as pupils provided a focus for Josephine Brady’s paper on the work of the Sisters of St Joseph in rural Tasmania, Penny Kane on the central place of the public school in the goldfields’ community of Major’s Creek, and Vicki MacKnight on the moral paradigm in Victorian primary schools. Responding to major Government inquiries in recent years Michele Langfield and Carmella Grynberg looked at different aspects of child migration, while Kate Gaffney and Shurlee Swain presented papers examining abusive practice in Victorian government and non-government children’s homes. Providing a foretaste of good things to come, Corinne Manning and Leanne Monk of La Trobe University, gave a progress report on a project which is utilizing oral histories, archival sources and innovative methods of communicating with non-verbal residents to produce a history of the soon-to-be-closed Kew Cottages, an institution established in 1887 to house and educate children with intellectual disabilities.

Website

The keynote papers from the international conference Stories for Children, Histories of Childhood/ Histoires d’enfant, histoires d’enfance, organised by the GRAAT (EA 2113), University François-Rabelais, Tours, November 18-19, 2005 are now available for consultation on the following website: www.univ-tours.fr/Graat.