Epistemic trauma and transracial adoption: Author(iz)ing folkways of knowledge and healing

Abstract

BackgroundDespite contested definitions, trauma is often conceptualized as an event that shocks or overloads human systems, shaping memory and meanings as the body and mind attempt to cope and survive. Adoption is often the presumed redress for childhood trauma. Thus, few scholars have examined how, or if, some conditions of adoption or the status itself might involve unique traumas or adversities. ObjectiveIn this paper, I argue that the condition of being transracially adopted can represent intersectional minoritized statuses, which in turn activate potentially distinct formations of epistemic trauma— structurally and relationally transmitted harms to a person as a knower and to their capacities for claiming, making sense of, and healing through their lived experiences. Participants and settingI draw from my personal and professional standpoints as a black, mixed-race, woman who was transracially adopted from public foster care as an infant, became a child welfare caseworker and later, a child welfare scholar. MethodsUsing a critical and reflexive autoethnographic method I ask how theories of epistemic injustice might help to highlight conditions tied to the status “transracial adoptee” that distinguish adoption-specific trauma. By reflexively analyzing my experiences in the context of extant theory and research, this paper brings theories of epistemic injustice into conversation with an emic perspective on adoption. ResultsIn my experience, “transracial adoptee” and “mixed race” operated as statuses that occasioned epistemic injustices. I propose these conditions can become traumatic when they chronically and structurally disenfranchise claiming and cultivating folkways essential to one's healing and resilience across the life course. ConclusionsThis paper is a call to invest in advancing epistemologies of adoption and theories of trauma that are anchored within diverse adoption experiences. I also invite future scholarship to explore epistemic injustice in adoption as trauma, and to identify and disrupt the many spaces in which it may be enacted culturally, relationally, familially, and in a society through its laws, policies, practices, and scientific knowledge.