Reflection
Spring and summer has been “conference season” for me. In April I participated in a panel at the Association for Asian American Studies conference in Seattle. I then had the privilege of attending the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE) in beautiful Honolulu, Hawai’i in late May. From there I went to Chicago for the Korean Adoptee Adoptive family Network (KAAN) conference. As of today, I have two more conferences (Minnesota and Portland OR) and a special meeting I’ll share about in a later post. That makes five conferences from April to July, a personal record.
I’ve been reflecting on the differences between the types of conferences I’ve been attending. The KAAN Conference is the only one so far that is a community conference consisting primarily of adoptees. AAAS and the International Conference on Adoption Research (ICAR8) are academic scholarly conferences and NCORE is higher-education focused but not as heavy on the research. When presenting at academic conferences, I often feel as if I am trying to convince more traditional scholars that the community perspective is imperative and to advocate research is more committed to involving the community as more than objects to study. The opposite is true at community conferences; in those spaces I feel I am trying to convince community members that knowing about and participating in research is imperative in order for us to hold researchers accountable.
Each of these conference settings has unique cultures and vibes. Academic conferences tend to be more formal and the research often skews heavy on traditional research. At AAAS the audience were broadly Asian and Asian American scholars and the presentation related to the Side by Side project was an attempt to help situate Korean adoption into the broader Asian American research. I once wrote that as an Asian Korean adoptee, I felt we were relegated to footnotes in the history of Asians in the United States. Quite literally, for a long time we were only briefly mentioned in footnotes, if at all. Our presentation for AAAS was a compilation of lesson plans from diverse disciplines that use Side by Side. Mine was focused, of course, on a social work course that is required by all accredited social work programs. These plans are open access.
At NCORE, the audience is largely academic professionals working in higher education, many of whom are very directly working with students. As with AAAS, it was so unusual to be at a conference of mostly people of color. I was involved with two presentations at NCORE, both with a focus on transracial adoption. One of my presentations was on the Adoptee Consciousness model and how it could be helpful in working with transracial adoptee students. College is the time when many transracial adoptees step outside the sphere of their white adoptive families on their own for the first time and confront their racial and adoptee identity. For example, I remember when I went to college and being approached by Asian students and feeling very awkward and anxious because until then, I’d never been in a place where there were real Asians. What I wasn’t as prepared for was that most of those in attendance identified as transracial adoptees and our presentation was bringing up a lot of personal reflections for them.
At KAAN, I participated in a panel about adoptee representation and visibility in research. As a community conference, research is not the primary focus. I wanted to be part of this panel because as someone who values community scholarship and the power of a community’s involvement in research; as the Disability Rights Movement stated, “nothing about us without us is for us.” Being able to bring the research back to the community is my highest priority. This was my my 8th (I think?) KAAN conference. The first one was in the early 2000s in Minnesota, when it was mostly parents of Korean adoptees and the adoptees in attendance were there to support the kids and present to the parents. What a difference from these past few years where it has completely flipped and it’s mostly adult adoptees.
Next week I will be attending ICAR8 – the International Conference on Adoption Research. This will be my 4th time presenting and each time there are more adoptee scholars attending and presenting. I’ll be presenting three sessions – on adoptee parenting, adoption discontinuity, and the adoptee consciousness model. And finally, at the end of the month I’ll be at the BIPOC Adoptees conference, a community conference, in Portland, Oregon.
Thank you to all who have engaged with me at these conferences or in online spaces. I appreciate hearing from you and your feedback helps me as I think about how I can better bridge the information I have access to back to my fellow adoptees in community. I’ll be back after my travels with many more reflections.
Harlow's Monkey 