Movement without movement: ‘RAD kids’ as circulatory problems in United States adoption pipelines

Abstract

This article explores Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) diagnosis and early popular forms of the Evergreen model of attachment therapy popular in the 1990s. It argues that the Evergreen model operated as part of a biomedical knowledge regime designed to mediate and remediate flows of adoptable children in the United States. The article juxtaposes attachment therapists’ understandings of child circulation via adoption with adoptees’ experiences of their own circulation to illuminate the ways in which early attachment therapists pathologized children’s attempts to exert agency within the limited scope of their own circulation and during treatment. The article elaborates on the adult-centric notion of linear flows of circulation via adoption vs. some children’s ‘ambi-valent’ experience of their own circulation. Ethnographic attention to such paradoxes within child circulation is important for illuminating how knowledge regimes attempt to smooth child circulation routes when children present as ‘circulatory problems’; it also asks by what processes children’s assertion of agency is constructed as a problem more broadly in the United States.