The Journal of Korean Adoptions is pleased to announce a call for papers for their upcoming third issue: Community. The issue will focus on community as a significant project that Korean adoptees have been engaged in building since the early 1980s. Submission deadline: April 1, 2010.
Journal of Korean Adoptions Third Issue Call for Papers
Journal of Korean Adoption Studies
Number 3: Community
Edited by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
Deadline for submissions:
1 April 2010
The third issue of the journal focuses on community as a significant
project that Korean adoptees have been engaged in building since the
early 1980s. This issue facilitates opportunities to examine struggles
for community by documenting previous models on which adoptees have
relied to imagine possible directions toward developing collective
unity.
Currently, Korean adoptee community consists of an assortment of urban
local and national organizations that are located in adoptive
countries and Seoul, where sizeable adoptee populations reside.
Equally important yet not contingent on location, adoptee digital
communities - blogs, chat rooms, and websites - document adoptee
experiences and make possible "identifying and finding one another."
These sites of community interact at different levels in national and
transnational settings at conferences, events, and gatherings that
network new members.
Because the Korean adoption program is the longest and continuously
running adoption program in the world, it has made possible the
largest multi-generational population of adoptees in modern history.
Consequently, its work to define and organize itself as a community
has inspired adoptee diasporas originating beyond Korea to
conceptualize their own.
Realizing the historical significance and variety of adoptee community
building efforts, we ought not to take notions of community for
granted, but instead ought to return to questions of empowerment to
consider the challenges, risks, and stakes that are involved in
forming a substantial, self-reflexive adoptee presence that can
represent its interests and that can collaborate with advocates and
allies for shared goals.
Toward that objective, we might problematize current models of
identity-based community that privilege neutrality and socializing
while recognizing the important work such inclusivity performs. Beyond
the descriptive, we might look to more definitions of community that
have made possible coalitions with other members of the adoption
community, Korean nationals, and overseas advocates and allies.
Possible questions include, but are not limited to: How have practices
of adoptee community drawn from and put pressure on theories of social
action such as anarchism, counterpublicity, multiculturalism,
multitude, netizen networks, transnationalism, among others? How has
producing community compelled us to revisit definitions of adoptee
identity along with strategic uses of adoptee cultural capital as
activists, artists, businesspersons, intellectuals, lawyers, teachers,
and other professions? Which class, gendered, racial, and sexual
contexts have we overlooked in the interest of narrating our
experience? What comparisons might be drawn between our community and
adoptee diasporas or even groups within a larger Korean diaspora
toward greater collectivity?
The theme of the third issue of Journal of Korean Adoption Studies is
community. We invite you to submit scholarly papers as well as
creative work related to Korean adoption studies. We also welcome
papers that are related to Korean adoption studies, but do not
particularly deal with community.
* * *
Journal of Korean Adoption Studies is dedicated to all aspects of
international adoption from Korea. The peer-reviewed journal welcomes
academic essays, testimonies of adoption, illustrations, and reviews
of new publications or releases related to Korean adoption studies.
The bi-annual journal is published in English and Korean. Academic
essays are expected to follow the standard North American MLA style
(see MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th edition).
Guest Editor: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Ph.D. in Literature and Creative
Writing, St. Olaf College. Journal of Korean Adoption Studies is
published by the Korean adoptee organization Global Overseas Adoptees'
Link (G.O.A.'L), Seoul, Korea.
Please send your submissions to:
jkas.goal@gmail.com
