Australia – Adelaide Meetings (2007)

Heart of Stone

New book launch by Hoa Stone released 2007.

Thursday, May 17th, 2007.
6.00 – 7:30pm
at the South Australian Baptist
Union Centre, 35 – 39 King William
Road, Unley For more info email: sabu@sabu.com.au

Moving Cultures Conference

Panel session: Overseas Adoptions and Australian Post-traditional Kinship: Transnationals, Diasporas and Cosmopolitanisms at

Moving Cultures, Shifting Identities: a conference about migration, connection, heritage and cultural memory. Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia. 3 – 5 December 2007

“Transnational adoption in Australia, and throughout most of the Western world, almost always involves incoming Asian, African, Eastern European and South American born children joining local parents with contrasting, and predominantly White ethnic backgrounds. Adopted Indigenous Australian children are also sometimes a feature of these multi-racial families. Meta-narratives of this trend tend to divide issues into questions of salvation or colonialism. The recent wave of celebrities adopting children from overseas, which has drawn considerable public attention to, and debate over the politics of such differences, also perpetuates such representations.

These panel sessions (more than one may be required to accommodate all speakers) aim to move beyond the spotlight in order to gain a deeper insight into how ordinary adoptive parents and adoptees in Australia negotiate and represent the new global mobility and inter-ethnic circumstances forming their post-traditional families and identities. A number of the panelists themselves represent a combination of these biographies, enriching the field with sharp, fresh perspectives and innovative methodologies. Papers employ a range of theoretical lenses to foreground the social, cultural and psychological dimensions of this complex, intentionally intimate yet publicly visible and global form of migration. While the construction of cultural and racial identities in adoption remains a central theme, it is hoped that insights from the discussion can also contribute to wider research on the discourses and other processes that enable, complicate and/or contradict notions of openness, belonging and boundary management in contemporary Australian families and society.”

With Kim Gray, Trudy Rosenwald, Tricia Fronek, Jessica Walton and Indigo Williams Willing. Session date tba. A social will also be held for adoptees during this time, for more info email: i.willing@uq.edu.au

fhrc.flinders.edu.au/events/movingcultures.html

East Meets West is now holding Social nights for Inter-country Adoptees

Anyone who may be interested please contact:
Tracey Gilbert
East Meets West
Phone/Fax: 08 8132 1570
info@eastmeetswest.org.au
www.eastmeetswest.org