Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1986.

Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2006. Dept. of Psychology and Education. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-84).

No description available.

Interviews were conducted with 20 parents in the US who have adopted one or more children from China. The study focuses on the motivation to adopt, decision making regarding adoption and the process in relation to rational choice theory. The interviews also inquired about their required adoption trip to China and the post-adoption adjustment phase including bonding and developmental delays, as well as about why families chose to adopt from China, how they learned about the adoption agency they used and whether or not they knew families that had adopted internationally and more specifically from China. This information provided insight into the way that families obtained information that helped them reach important decisions throughout the adoption process. / Master of Science

Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Theses (Faculty of Education) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

This is a research on Chinese women’s marriage migration to South Korea. I explore this topic by adopting the perspective of politics of intimacy. It aims to find out how the broad political and economic transformations in China and South Korea structure this migration flow and how the operation of transnational matchmaking as a business shapes marriage relationship. In addition, how Chinese women negotiate their intimate life and adapt to Korean society. I highlight the issue of intimacy in Chinese women’s marriage migration. Capitalist development and the change of economic structure in China and South Korea generate potential migrants, and the gendered mobility structure shaped by South Korean immigration policies particularly favors women’s marriage migration. Transnational matchmaking, organized on market principles, provides a means for brides and grooms to know each other. However, it also contributes to generating a marriage relationship without emotional basis, which contradicts with the discourse of love. Economic political forces and the operation of matchmaking as a business shape it is particularly difficult for Chinese women to build up a marriage relationship structured around love and emotion. However, in a situation that love and emotion are considered as the basis of “modern” marriage, a relationship without it has to be dealt with. I thus discuss their negotiation of intimacy in both premarital and marital relationships. In premarital intimacy, the discourse of love is manipulated by marriage brokers on behalf of men in a way that entraps women. After marriage, as both parties only barely know each other, the version of companionship they negotiate is different from that in other marriages and is often manifested in the issues of money and reproduction. However, both money management and reproduction are sites of power struggle between men and women. Men tend to use money to control women, and they press women to bear a child. However, when women are not sure about the relationship, they are usually reluctant to do so. Despite that women possess certain emotional power; in general they are in a weak position. Thus, they use the weapons of the weak, secret, non-confrontational methods to deal with the reproductive pressure. I thus demonstrate that intimacy is not negotiated by women and men of equal standing, but existing gender conventions are played out in the process of negotiation. Overall, I argue that it is important to discuss the issue of intimacy in transnational marriage as this is a perspective to avoid conflating women’s marriage migration with labor migration and reveal the emotional and human aspect of their marriage and experience. / published_or_final_version / Sociology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 18, 2007). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 196-203).

This dissertation examines the histories of international adoption and child sponsorship in China from the 1930s to the 1950s to illustrate China’s crucial but unrecognized role in shaping the politics and practices of global humanitarianism. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Chinese child welfare organizations developed a new form of humanitarian fundraising in which private citizens across the world “adopted” Chinese children by funding their lives at orphanages in China. Under the adoption model, Chinese children and their foreign “foster parents” built personal relationships through the exchange of photographs, gifts, and translated letters that used familial terms of address. The relationships forged between children and their foster parents constituted a new mode of affective and material exchange across national, racial, and cultural boundaries that I call “global intimacy.” At the same time, the adoption plan was also deeply ideological, embedding the relationships between children and their sponsors within the politics of WWII and the Cold War. At once emotional and economic, humanitarian and political, the adoption plan transformed the emotional loyalties of children into a key battleground on the affective terrain of these global conflicts. The emergence of the adoption plan as one of the most successful methods of humanitarian fundraising in China precipitated a broader “intimate turn” in global humanitarian practice. During WWII, Chinese child welfare organizations developed new discursive and material practices—as well as new global administrative structures—that made the adoption of Asian children into a distinct form of humanitarian rescue. After the war, an American organization called China’s Children Fund utilized the rhetoric of Christian love to transform the adoption plan into one of the largest humanitarian programs in Asia, systematizing the transnational flow of gifts and letters to create a paradoxical bureaucracy of global intimacy. When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, rather than dismiss the adoption plan as a tool of the reactionary Nationalist Party and their American imperialist allies, they instead sought to transform it into a centerpiece of a new form of “revolutionary humanitarianism.” However, during the Korean War the CCP ultimately decided to dismantle all foreign humanitarian institutions in China, leading transnational aid organizations to again remake the adoption plan as a lynchpin of a new “Cold War humanitarianism” across East Asia. “Adopted by the World” sheds light on the global history of humanitarianism, the intertwining of intimate relations and international relations during the WWII and Cold War eras, and the political significance of children in modern Chinese history. By analyzing how Chinese child welfare institutions utilized children’s letters to mold international opinion of China, I show how children were enlisted as key actors within the political campaigns of both the Nationalist and Communist parties. Engaging with recent scholarship that has argued that the provision of global humanitarian aid served the Cold War foreign policy interests of Western powers, this dissertation explores how the recipients and critics of humanitarian aid in China both shaped and challenged the post-WWII global humanitarian order.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Intercountry adoption emerged in Australia in the1970s, at the end of the Vietnam War and with each new decade the adoption ‘community’ and broader society have become more aware of the challenges and complexities of the adoptee experience. It is an area where contemporary preoccupations with issues of identity, kinship relations and concerns about ‘race’ and cultural belonging are being played out. Research on intercountry adoption has, until recent years, been primarily conducted by researchers in the professions of psychology, social work, law and child development. As a consequence these professions have to a large extent influenced and driven public debate and policy in this area. Issues about cultural and racial identity have generally been discussed and problematised either at an individual or familial level ¬how adoptees negotiate issues of racial difference in particular socio-political, historical and cultural contexts is usually missing from these accounts. As intercountry adoption is intricately connected to society’s ideas about race, culture, ethnicity, kinship and belonging -to family and to nation -the disciplines of sociology and anthropology have an important research role to play. This study seeks to problematise the narrow definition of identity that adoptees are usually subject to, attempting to move beyond essentialist notions about the ‘loss of identity’ and ‘loss of culture’ associated with the adoption experience which has tended to promote a discourse of victimisation. Rather, the study asks questions about how particular discourses of race, adoption and identity have impacted on adoptees’ lives and the different modes of belonging adoptees employ to manage their positions of difference. This is a comparative qualitative study using multiple methods of social inquiry. It focuses on two core groups of Australian intercountry adoptees -an adolescent and an adult group -who were born in Vietnam, Korea, Sri Lanka and Malaysia. Their life histories are compared by placing their experiences in the broader socio-political and historical contexts of Australia’s immigration policies, adoption policies and history of race relations. Their hybrid experiences are also compared to some transracial adoptees in other Western nations and to some other transnational groups, within the broader body of work on postcolonial identity construction, in an effort to illuminate how intercountry adoptees’ share the ‘third space’ with others who also live through issues about cultural authenticity and the essentialism often associated with identity formation. The study concludes with an alternative reading of the intercountry adoptee experience. It suggests that some adoptees are managing to (re)invent and (re)define their fluid, hybrid identities within the broader context of culturally diverse youth and adults in multicultural Australia and by their membership within other diasporic movements. The study points to the importance of appropriate social support including support from peer groups, family, other adoptees, and the significance of place to adoptees’ sense of belonging. ‘Cultural identity’, as the often quoted Stuart Hall (1990:225) suggests, “is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’” and “it belongs to the future as much as to the past”.

Higher Sites has been designed as a fully functioning business. The appendix of this creative project paper includes Higher Sites' full business plan. The business plan includes projected revenue and profit for the next three years.Higher Sites 101 is a two-part DVD set designed to familiarize new Higher Sites employees with the company. Disc I explains the services that Higher Sites offers to adoptive parents. It also walks the viewer through the process of creating adoption videos using the Higher Sites method. Example videos are included. Disc II is a data DVD that includes full-screen QuickTime movies. The movies demonstrate to the viewer how to perform specific tasks in Final Cut Pro, iDVD and DVD Studio Pro. It is necessary for the viewer to watch these QuickTime movies on a monitor that is 21 inches or larger. / Department of Telecommunications