Story Of Adoption Research Articles

A qualitative exploration of adoptive family practices in contemporary India: the voices of adoptees of closed adoptions

Drawing on an empirical narrative research study, this article illuminates the lived experiences of Indian adoptees of closed adoptions, that is, those who had no contact with their birth parents in the run-up to or following adoption. The findings of five in-depth accounts comprising young adult and adult adoptees present a deep and nuanced understanding of what remains a relatively unexplored area of adoptive family lives in contemporary India practised in an environment where the intricacies of culture and notions of biological ties are privileged over social ties. This article illustrates how the way adoption stories are lived, experienced and shaped contributes to adoptees’ understandings of how to navigate the challenges to confirm their membership in their adoptive families in a situation where these relationships fall under constant suspicion, denial and disapproval. While it is accepted that this non-representative sample cannot reflect wider perspectives of adoptive lives, it nevertheless highlights the inherent complexities and provides a useful springboard for further research.

Coming Home, Staying Home: Adopters' Stories about Transitioning Their New Dog into Their Home and Family.

Published research estimates shelter dogs' post-adoption returns at 7-20%, with a significant percentage of these occurring in the first month post-adoption. To better understand factors that contribute to the success or failure of long-term rehoming outcomes, this study sought to understand post-adoption challenges up to four years post-adoption, targeting dogs identified as more likely to be returned. Thirty-one adopters participated in semi-interviews. Thematic analysis of their responses yielded three themes: (1) The adoption process takes time and requires patience; (2) Building trust and learning limits are essential to lasting adoptive relationships; and (3) Human-dog relationships are idiosyncratic because they involve unique individuals. These results have potential application in programs designed to guide adopters and dogs through a successful adoption process. Access to real-life adoption stories, such as those uncovered in this study, might help new adopters develop reasonable expectations and learn from others' experiences as they work to develop lasting relationships with their dogs.

Transracial Adoption, Memory, and Mobile, Processual Identity in Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road

Representations of adoptions tend to concentrate on normatively conceived forms of identity, which prioritize the genetic lineage of adoptees. In contrast, scholarship on autobiographical writing emphasizes that identities are not fixed but are always in process and intersectional because they are formed in within inequal power relations. Kay’s experimental, autobiographical narrative Red Dust Road (2010) tackles the themes of adoption, the search for close relatives, and reunion. Many scholars of her autobiographical writings describe the fluidity of the diasporic adoptee identities created by her. My aim is more specific: I examine what I call Kay’s continuously mobile, processual identity construction as a transracial adoptee in Red Dust Road. I argue that her identity formation, which is also intersectional, is interconnected with her multidirectional networks of attachments and the experimental form of her adoption narrative. In addition to an intersectional approach and autobiographical studies, I draw on insights from adoption studies. In my reading of Kay’s work, I pay special attention to the inequalities derived from the intersecting vectors of adoption and race, which also intersect with other dimensions of difference, such as nation, gender, class, and sexual orientation. I employ the notion of the multidirectional in the sense in which McLeod applies it to the study of adoption writing. As I demonstrate, multidirectionality and the complex form of Red Dust Road provide versatile means of conveying Kay’s fragmented acts of memory, which assist her ongoing mobile, processual identity construction. Her multidirectional lines of transformative attachments finally bond her to her adoptive and biogenetic families as well as other affective connections. While Kay’s socially significant narrative indicates, amongst other adoption issues, that transracial adoptions can be successful, it is significant that it has no closure. The last chapter gestures toward potential new beginnings, which indicates that the story of adoption has no end.

Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story by Sarah Myer

Reviewed by: Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story by Sarah Myer Danica Ronquillo Myer, Sarah Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story; written and illus. by Sarah Myer. First Second, 2023 [272p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781250268792 $25.99 Paper ed. ISBN 9781250268808 $17.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 9-12 Living in Maryland with her white parents in the 1980’s, Korean adoptee Sarah Myer has an active imagination. Her older adoptee sister and classmates find her rambunctious personality distasteful, but she is steadfast in her love for mermaids, drawing, and watching anime and cosplaying to express her queerness. These outlets help Sarah feel “safe and happy, shrouded in my identity as an artist. But something dark still lurked beneath”; she doesn’t know who her own birth parents are and cannot feel a sense of belonging anywhere as she experiences racism and bullying at school. As she enters middle and high school, she increasingly uses violence to defend herself and push people away, unable to control her anger and feeling as though she is a monster. This is a fierce graphic memoir with grit and honesty, and Myer’s mix of cartoon and sketch illustrations powerfully portray the loneliness of exploring marginalized identities within predominantly white, hetero spaces, with unsupportive faculty members and rising homophobia. While sparkling bright color palettes easily convey Sarah’s sense of joy and freedom at attending art and pop culture events, the bright hues contrast with the deforming panels, aggressive line work, and intense dialogue to skillfully capture Sarah’s dehumanizing experiences at school and deep insecurities. Visceral imagery of anatomical bodies and the ghoulish physical manifestation of anger represent Sarah’s raw, uncomfortable emotions. Eventually, Sarah finds a support system in her parents, who are sympathetic and admit their regrets for not doing enough for her, and in a theater club whose members genuinely want to be friends with her. Sarah’s father offers the keen observation that “sometimes people try to invade your world without trying to understand or respect it,” underscoring the book’s message to young people to find their happiness and build the life they want for themselves. End matter has an author’s note and adoptee and mental health resources. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? by Gonda Van Steen

Reviewed by: Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? by Gonda Van Steen Jack Neubauer Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? By Gonda Van Steen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. xx + 330 pp. Cloth $85.00, paper $39.95. Since the conclusion of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Asian children have been adopted by families in the United States and across the Global North. This story is well known. Successive waves of international adoptions from Korea, Vietnam, China, and elsewhere were celebrated in the media and popular culture at the time, and more recently they have been the subject of a growing body of critical scholarship by Catherine Ceniza Choy, Arissa Oh, Leslie Wang, and others. In contrast, the story of the approximately 3,200 Greek children adopted by American families during the Cold War remains largely unknown. As a result, readers of Gonda Van Steen's meticulously researched book, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece, may be surprised to learn that during the "early Cold War period" (1948–1962), adoptions of Greek children to the United States far outpaced even those of Korean children on a per capita basis. An accomplished scholar of ancient Greek theater, Van Steen was inspired to research the history of Cold War Greek adoptions when she received an email from a young man named Mike, whose mother and aunt were adopted by a Greek American family after their father, Greek Communist Elias Argyriadis, [End Page 158] was executed by the Greek state in 1952. The intergenerational story of the Argyriadis family provides a narrative anchor for Van Steen's analysis of Greek-to-American adoptions, which she argues were shaped by the interconnected histories of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), the global Cold War, and the broader international adoption movement. Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece is divided into three parts. Part I analyzes the combustible mixture of "push factors" driving the initial wave of Greek-to-American adoptions in the early 1950s. These include the dire social conditions of post–Civil War Greece (as of 1950, an estimated one in eight Greek children had lost one or both parents), violent persecution of left-wing families, and the Greek state's efforts, led by Queen Frederica, to cultivate American sympathy for "orphan Greece" while alleviating its social welfare burdens. In Part II, Van Steen demonstrates how early efforts to "find families" for Greek orphans transformed into a movement that was driven primarily by "the pull factor of the American demand for available white children" (125). The American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA), the largest Greek American voluntary association, helped meet this demand for Greek children through "proxy" adoptions in which a third-party agent matched prospective parents and Greek children with little screening or oversight. The result, Van Steen argues, was "a full-blown black market for babies" that enriched greedy Greek and American middlemen, who resorted to bribery and coercion to reclassify the stigmatized children of Greek single mothers as "adoptable orphans" (124). Based on extensive interviews, Part III presents a montage of individual adoption stories that illuminate the diversity of adoptees' attitudes and experiences. First, Van Steen introduces us to Dionysios Dionou, who refers to himself as a "stolen child" and calls his adopters "purchasers" rather than parents (185–87). A few pages later, we meet Dean, whose adoptive family lovingly joke that the $500 in fees they paid to adopt him was "the deal of a lifetime." Dean even framed the check his American parents used to pay for his adoption as symbol of their special family history (189–90). If the many individual stories in this section eventually start to bleed together in the reader's mind, it only underscores Van Steen's argument that they are constitutive of an emerging "collective subjectivity among Greek adoptees" (239). Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece is intended for both academic specialists and Greek adoptees interested in understanding the complex history behind their own personal journeys. For readers interested in the broader histories of childhood and adoption, Van Steen's in-depth analysis of Cold War Greece provides a fascinating case study for...

Intergenerational Voices of Adoption: Family Stories of Adoptees and Their Adult Children

Little is known about adoptees’ experiences through adulthood. Individuals sometimes make sense of their heritage, and come to understand and express themselves in their unique voices, through storytelling. Five mother-child(ren) dyads and triads participated. The mothers had been adopted in infancy and raised by an adoptive family. Their biological child(ren) had grown up aware their mother was an adoptee. The feminist relational method of the listening guide (Gilligan et al., 2003) was employed to hear the adoption stories passed from one generation to the next. Parent and adult child(ren) were interviewed together to explore voices embedded in the relational context of their story. The joint family interviews were analyzed for these different voices. The findings suggest mothers passed down stories of positive adoption experiences through voices that were both embracing of their adoption narrative and sometimes cautious. The children spoke from voices of embrace and curiosity. Both generations stated the meaningfulness of co-constructing family adoption narratives.

Adoptees and Americans: Exporting Hans Christian Andersen and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)

Hans Christian Andersen and Karen Blixen (aka.) Isak Dinesen have been widely read in America, with Hollywood’s Out of Africa adaptation adding to the attention. Both writers dramatized their alienation with adoption stories reaching across national and racial boundaries. They became iconic writers in the US for many reasons, but their preoccupation with adoption has been insufficiently explored. In fact, their transnational, transracial, transsexual, and cross-species adoption tales have entered US conversations about the Other, since the adoptee arrives in familial structures from “other” ideological, economic, or racial locations. Their adoption tales further fit American rights discourses, by insisting on the rights of belonging and conditions of freedom laid down by reason and law. They also subscribe to emotional discourses that evoke in the audience empathy and emotions related to dignity and humanity. Fairy tale adoptions fit the classic American quest narrative—Huck Finn-style—in which a heroic protagonist takes off into the unknown to find an identity, rooted in liberty, independence, and freedom. In a 21st-century world populated by migrants, refugees, orphans, adoptees, adoptive parents, and adopted or adoptive nations, Andersen and Blixen communicate with global adoption narratives the need for new ideological constellations of family, community, and nation.

FAIRsFAIR adoption story : Inist-CNRS, IRD and Paris Urfist adapt the FAIRAware tool to France

FAIRsFAIR adoption story : Inist-CNRS, IRD and Paris Urfist adapt the FAIRAware tool to France

African Hermeneutics of Western education: A case of Yuyi Wamunyima Mupatu of Barotseland, Zambia, 1897-1982

An African proverb states that “until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter”. This is the case of the historiography of Western education in Africa, which was largely Eurocentric. Unlike many studies that are Eurocentric, the objectives of this article were to examine the history of education in Africa from the African’s point of view; to demonstrate that Africans were not passive recipients, but that they engaged Western education in a dialogue with indigenous African education. This has been achieved by examining the career of Yuyi Wamunyima Mupatu of Mongu-Lealui district, a man who made a significant contribution to the hermeneutics of Western education in Zambia. He became a teacher at Barotse National School but was twice fired for refusing to compromise on quality education. Mupatu led a movement that significantly decolonized education in a time which was forbidding. He established Makaplulwa School in 1945 but the school was closed due to local governance challenges in 1949. In 1963, the school reopened. Today Makapulwa School stands as Mupatu Combined School in Limulunga district. The study concludes that Mupatu’s is contribution to education is a demonstration of African people’s capability to interpret western culture and also their desire to retain what was African even as they embraced the West. It is a story of adoption, interpretation and adaptation of Western education. Mupatu was a product of both the Barotse indigenous education and Western education. To present this discourse, I relied on primary sources, mainly information from those who knew him; family members and his former pupils, his biography and other secondary sources on the subject. The study is significant because it highlights the people’s aspirations of what education should be in Africa.

Current Readiness Status of Electric Vehicles in Indonesia: Multistakeholder Perceptions

As a net oil importer since 2004, Indonesia’s success in developing fuel economy and infrastructure for electric vehicles would be vital to ensuring energy security and decarbonization from the transport sector. Following the Presidential Regulation on the Acceleration Program for battery-based EV for Road Transportation in 2019, the Indonesian government provides incentives for the domestic production of EVs. However, as EV technology is relatively new for the domestic automotive industry in Indonesia, it needs to go through stages of development to achieve full readiness in society. This study analyses the key stakeholders’ perceptions of EV industries using the Japanese technology readiness assessment (J-TRA) to better understand the current readiness level of EVs in Indonesia. Primary data are collected through interviews with an EV start-up company, experts in the EV field, government officials in charge of the national EV projects, and EV end-users. Extensive literature related to success stories of EV adoption in other countries was conducted as the basis for this study. The results showed that key stakeholders agree that EV technology has reached a high readiness level in technology development. Most of the stakeholders voted that the readiness bottleneck is commercialization, safety, and integration parameters. Furthermore, an elaborate policy recommendation gathered from both literature reviews and interviews with related stakeholders is presented.

Intentional Kinship through Caring Relationships, Heritage, and Identity: Adoptive Parents’ Inclusion of Non-Biological and Non-Affinal Relationships on Family Maps

Structural open adoption has been beneficial to adoptees in integrating their birth heritage and identity. Adoptive parents also may sometimes seek out others who are neither related biologically nor through partnership to support their child in developing an integrated sense of identity. To what extent do these intentional kinship relationships become incorporated within the adoptive family network and how do adoptive parents view their role in their child’s life? Qualitative data on family inclusion of non-biological and non-affinal kin are reported from interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and heterosexual adoptive parents (n = 25 families). Analyses of verbal and visual data from family map drawing interviews indicated that adoptive parents from the different types of families similarly included intentional kin in their conceptualization of their child’s family. Adopted children’s foster carers, family friends, other adoptive families, and other children and adults were specifically included on family maps to facilitate children’s knowledge of different aspects of their birth heritage and adoption story. The implications of open adoption policy therefore move beyond considerations of only birth family contact. In practice, open adoption procedures convey a broad message to families that appear to widen adoptive parents’ conceptualization of kinship.

Someone Else’s Child: A Co-Constructed, Performance Autoethnography of Adoption from Three Perspectives

Through a framework of reconciling the other, this collaborative autoethnographic performance co-constructs the adoption experience from three perspectives in three different families: a mother struggling with the ethical and emotional implications of the transnational adoption of her daughter; an adult reflecting on her childhood as an adoptee feeling loved, but different; and a woman who met her biological sister at age 28 after her parents revealed a lifelong secret. To develop individual adoption narratives, we applied autoethnographic tools of interactive interviews with family members, reflective writing, and document review (Ellis, 2004) of photos, letters, emails, and calendars. During one school year, we met monthly to discuss relevant literature, share and critique each other’s methods and writing, and identify the common themes in our three, diverse experiences. The result of the iteration of the individual and group processes is a script that weaves together our adoption stories, the discoveries of ourselves, and how, after negotiating feelings and identities, we reconciled the other through positive, loving relationships.

“Outcasts to Princesses”: U.S. White Adoptive Parents’ Fairy-tale Narratives of Adoption from China

“Outcasts to Princesses”: U.S. White Adoptive Parents’ Fairy-tale Narratives of Adoption from China Yanli Luo (bio) In June 2016, the adoption hearing of Danielle, a five-year-old girl from Michigan, drew wide attention in a number of media outlets, including NBC News, Today.com, and huffpost.com. As the court judge Patricia Garner dressed as Snow White to finalize her adoption and eight case workers showed up as Disney prince and princesses to celebrate it, most media articles use terms related to Disney fairy tales, such as “magical” or “happily ever after.” Commenting on these reports, Liz Latty, a writer and adoptee, laments that the “all-too-familiar storyline linking adoption and fairy tales” causes much “anxiety and exhaustion” in her own body, since it was in the same celebratory fairy-tale tone that her adoptive parents used to tell her adoption story “time and time again,” even in her thirties. To her, narratives like these brush off the complex reality behind adoption and “den[y] adoptees the acknowledgement and support necessary to process their experiences across a lifetime” (“What We Lost”). Much earlier, a Korean adoptee Nikki raised another issue about adoption narratives in the United States. On August 29, 2012, she posted a blog article criticizing that the U.S. adoption narrative “is so completely dominated by adoptive parents as a group—THEIR experiences, THEIR emotions, what THEY believe to be ‘the truth’ about their children’s adoptions.” “It’s not that an adoptive parent cannot have plenty of good, worthwhile things to say about adoption,” she asserts, “[b]ut there is SO MUCH of THIS out there . . . And that is especially problematic when you have white people clearly looking to take the easy way out and not think about race too hard” (“Why White Adoptive Parents,” emphasis in the original). The issues Latty and Nikki have raised find a unique combination in narratives about adoption from China. Starting from the early 1990s, tens [End Page 103] of thousands of Chinese, predominantly female, children have been adopted into American, primarily white middle-class, families. Since then, China has remained the major sending country of adoptees, and the United States has been the largest receiving country. Till 2019, about 92,202 Chinese children have been adopted into the United States.1 As white parents embracing Chinese babies became an prominent phenomenon in the United States, adoption from China has also become a focal point in U.S. adoption narratives, most of which are constructed by white adoptive parents.2 Among the 75 narratives of adoption from China listed on amazon.com in April 2017, 56 are written by white American adoptive parents, including 49 by mothers.3 U.S. white adoptive parents have thus become powerful producers of adoption narratives. In these narratives, the fairy-tale genre plays out prominently: a long list of picture books about adoption from China—including Buffi A. Young’s Miracle in the Land of Wu, Mick Verga’s The Lonely Little Horse: A Chinese Adoption Story, Catherine Conley’s Coming Home: The Journey from Heaven to Your Adopted Home, and Grace Lin’s The Red Thread: An Adoption Fairy Tale—are written in the genre of fairy tales. This article analyzes two picture books created by white adoptive parents, Rose Lewis’s I Love You Like Crazy Cakes (2000, illustrated by Jane Dyer) and Stephan Molnar-Fenton’s An Mei’s Strange and Wondrous Journey (1998, illustrated by Vivienne Flesher), both written in the fairy-tale genre. Lewis’s book portrays a single, white, middle-class woman who adopts a girl from China and provides an abundant life for her in the United States. Molnar-Fenton’s narrative features a white, middle-class adoptive father who adopts another Chinese girl and brings her back to join his wife in the United States. Compared with fairy-tale narratives mentioned above, the two books are more influential ones written by white adoptive parents. The author of The Red Thread, Grace Lin, is not an adoptive parent, and the other narratives are self-published, thus having limited circulation. The two books, however, are illustrated by established professional illustrators, published by well-known commercial...

Editor's Introduction

It is now commonplace to observe that we live in “unprecedented times.” The cliché isn't without merit. The Covid-19 pandemic has ruthlessly revealed and exacerbated deep fissures—epistemic, racial, epidemiological, economic—in American society. The murder of George Floyd, recorded on video in Minneapolis this May, has inspired renewed agitation across the country for racial justice and against police brutality. Such protests demand of us to consider our assumptions and convictions regarding whiteness, state violence, and political identity.We hope, therefore, that this issue of the JJE may aid in reflection, research, and political action beyond the commonplace. In his essay, JJE coeditor Jonathan Crane offers extended reflections on the difficulties of ethical reasoning within a pandemic, noting that while “[b]ioethical deliberations most frequently occur outside of the situation of concern,” in the current pandemic and other comparable crises, ethicists do not have the luxury of distance. Crane argues, “Asking a question like ‘How can Jewish ethics solve the problem of the COVID-19 pandemic?’ is unhelpful. The pandemic is not a problem in search of a solution. It is many things but not a singular problem. It is wiser to wonder, ‘What can Jewish ethics be in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic? What might a Jewish ethic look like from within a pandemic?’”Joshua Moise-Silverman's essay, “Jewish Ethical Reflections on the Promises and Challenges of Mitochondria Replacement Therapy,” takes up the bioethical and halakhic considerations of MRT. This replacement technology in the context of human reproduction can, as Moise-Silverman explains, “prevent a child from inheriting mitochondrial disease from their mother,” but may also raise significant questions about the child's Jewish status in some Orthodox Jewish communities. Moise-Silverman traces the history of rabbinic debate around this technology and the ongoing communal questions the therapy presents.Amanda Mbuvi's essay, though based in entirely different sources, also raises provocative questions about children in Jewish communities. Her text is a children's book, Rebecca's Journey Home, which tells the story of a white American Jewish family's adoption of a baby girl from Vietnam. Mbuvi turns her analytic eye to the language and pictures of this short book, arguing persuasively that the book illustrates—literally—some significant assumptions and conflicts in American Jewish racial and identity discourses. Mbuvi concludes, “Viewing the baby through a gaze both loving and steeped in stereotype, Rebecca's Journey Home demonstrates the pitfalls that the American context presents for conceptualizing Jewish identity across racial lines. However, the book also illustrates the potential of Jewish tradition to serve as a basis for thinking beyond the American rules of race and even for transforming them.”Geoffrey Claussen's essay, “Teaching Modern Jewish Ethics through Role-Play,” invites readers into his classroom, where he provides a detailed account of a recent course in Jewish ethics. In Claussen's class, students represent modern Jewish thinkers in verbal dialogue, holding fast to these thinkers' points of view in order to engage one another in sustained conversation and dispute over a body of contemporary Jewish ethical questions. Claussen notes, “Some students were more reluctant to take on perspectives with which they strongly disagreed, but even students who took on such perspectives once or twice during the semester reported that they found great value in the experience.”Jason Weiner's article, “Are There Limits to How Far One Must Go for Others? Toward a Theoretical Model for Healthcare Providers,” engages contemporary bioethical principles alongside classical Jewish texts, and probes difficult questions about the limits of healthcare providers' responsibilities to their patients and profession. He argues that “[w]ithin both traditions, even as limits on the duties of healthcare providers are articulated, the societal importance of the role of healthcare providers to care for the sick is maintained. The perspectives examined do not see healthcare providers merely as mechanics of the body, but as individuals who have taken upon themselves social and even Divine expectations of responsibility to go out of their way for others.”Finally, we are very proud to feature Aryeh Cohen's translation of Rabbi Chaim David Halevi's responsa on incarceration in Jewish law. It is the first time that these extended selections from Halevi's work have been published in English; we will feature another set of newly translated material on incarceration in the next edition of this journal. Cohen's contribution reminds us that translation or curation of sources is also an ethical endeavor, even if we do not know all the “work” that these sources will do. To that end, we continue to invite scholars to submit curated compilations of Jewish source texts (from any language) in order that these texts may be accessible to broader communities of readers.

From Portafoglio to Eportfolio: The Evolution of Portfolio in Higher Education

This article traces the evolution of the concept of portfolio from the Renaissance to the present day. Over time the meaning of portfolio has evolved from its origins as a case for holding loose papers to other contexts such as finance, government and education. Portfolios have evolved from paper to electronic, from local networks to the world wide web. The decade from 2000–2010 was a period when technology became part of mainstream society and educational technology become part of mainstream higher education, and portfolios spread around the world. A shift in focus has occurred in eportfolio research and practice in the last decade, there has been more emphasis on pedagogy and student learning and less focus on digital technology as it has become ubiquitous. One of the key takeaways from the story of eportfolio adoption is that educators and institutions should adopt a critical perspective to new educational technologies and approaches. Finally, the history of portfolio in higher education shows that the higher education system will continue to gradually evolve, incorporating concepts, technology and approaches that are compatible rather than transformative.

Platform-based mobile payments adoption in emerging and developed countries: Role of country-level heterogeneity and network effects

Platform-based payment services such as mobile wallets (Mwallet) provide a unique value proposition to both customers and firms over other digital payment methods. Interestingly, the story of platform-based mobile payments adoption is unfolding differently across countries, with some emerging countries (China and India) outperforming developed countries. Using extant literature in International Business/International Marketing, industry reports, and qualitative interviews, we present a conceptual framework for mobile payments adoption at an aggregate level for customers and retailers. We present a set of hypotheses and derive the explanations using the literature on network effects and institutional theory. We test our framework on a diverse set of 30 countries and confirm the presence of network effects and the differential impact of perceived value, inertia, and culture on the adoption level of innovators and imitators. Importantly, we find a significant level of within- and between-country heterogeneity for mobile payment adoption, which provides further evidence for leapfrogging by emerging countries in the context of the mass adoption of mobile payments. These findings have significant implications for theory and practice in multinational organizations.

Rev. of La Couleur de l'Adoption [The Color of Adoption] by Manuelle Alix-Surprenant and Renaud Vinet-Houle

Rev. of La Couleur de l'Adoption [The Color of Adoption] by Manuelle Alix-Surprenant and Renaud Vinet-Houle Zeina Ismail-Allouche (bio) Rev. of La Couleur de l'Adoption [The Color of Adoption] MANUELLE ALIX-SURPRENANT AND RENAUD VINET-HOULE. Édition Alias, 2018, 163 pp. $20.59 (Paperback) ISBN: 9782924787373. "Je connais mon ennemi mieux que lui-même, j'ai survécue et je suis devenue Noire" (126).1 This is how Amandine Gay, born under the name X in 1984 in France, has chosen to conclude the narrative of her adoption into a white family at the age of five months. Gay reports feeling as if she were white wrapped in a Black skin. As an adopted child and now as a woman who affirms her Black identity, Gay writes about her encounter with a man who once told her, "a child coming from the unknown can become the one coming from everywhere" (125). This snapshot of Gay's life represents the experience of being adopted transracially in France. Facets of Gay's unique and individual experience subtly intersect other stories compiled by Manuelle Alix-Suprenant and Renaud Vinet-Houle in La Couleur de l'Adoption. The book's editors, adopted as children from Korea and Peru respectively, have gathered those stories to provide a platform for adoptees to voice, in their own words, their side of a still-controversial practice. In that sense, the book constitutes a unique endeavor by adoptees in Canada to narrate stories of adoption. This joint project was the fruit of nearly two years' intensive work identifying international adoptees and arranging for interviews to acquire their perceptions of their adoption experiences. This rencontre between Alix-Surprenant (the cofounder and former president of L'Hybridé) and Vinet-Houle (a professional photographer) allows for the insightful delving into the often unseen and untold experiences of being born in one country and then transferred to another country, to live among those of another race, speaking another language. In their preface, the editors salute the pioneering voices of adoptees who stood up and told their own stories of being adopted, from a variety of countries, into white families in Québec. Even though some twenty thousand transnational adoptees live in Québec, their voices in the province remain largely unheard, adoption discourse there being still led by the adoptive parents (5). The book presents thirty-eight snapshots from adoptee lives; all the stories are told in the first person and reveal some intimate facet of the adoptee's life. It is worth noting [End Page 270] here that transracial adoption in Québec peaked during the 1960's during The Baby Scoop, when almost all Indigenous children were adopted into non-Indigenous families as a continued, colonial strategy to assimilate Indigenous children into white families and culture. At that time, the government of Canada began phasing out from compulsory residential school education as the public began to understand its devastating impacts on families (Royal). The phrase "Sixties Scoop" was introduced in Canada by Patrick Johnston, author of the 1983 report Native Children and the Child Welfare System; "Sixties Scoop" refers to the mass removal of Indigenous children from their families and their placement in non-Indigenous families, in most cases without the consent of their families or tribal groups. The politically and emotionally charged nature of discussions about this practice might be the reason why the editors have deliberately avoided any contextualization of La Couleur De l'Adoption in the current realities of adoption practices in Québec. Despite the fact that La Couleur de l'Adoption does not critique adoption practice in Québec, it offers (as implied by the title of the book) a colorful insight into the very individual adoptee experiences. A powerful, compact compilation of adoptees' diverse, lived experiences and their intersections, La Couleur de l'Adoption attempts to convey the feeling of being born in a place with its own language, rhythm, habits, and culture and then raised in totally different surroundings. [End Page 271] Zeina Ismail-Allouche Zeina Ismail-Allouche is an international expert on children's rights and alternative care and an Individualized PhD candidate at Concordia University in...

The Ambivalence of Adoption: Adoptive Families’ Stories

The making of family through adoption is an emotionally and politically charged legal and social process. Both its historical and contemporary manifestations are characterised by ambivalence. Contemporary domestic adoption in the UK is at a point of profound reflection, as many of its ambivalent features are articulated at the levels of national policy making as well as within the micro political sphere of family life. Drawing on an online archive of adoption stories, in particular blogs written by adoptive parents, this article attends to the affective ways in which this ambivalence manifests within adoptive families. Queer theoretical resources are used to engage with themes of haunting, absence and loss, the strange temporalities of adoptive kinship and the complex politics of undoing at the heart of adoption.

Conceived Through Rape/Incest? Adoptive Parents' Experiences Managing Uncertainty and Disclosure Surrounding their Children's Origins.

Adoptive parents may be placed with children conceived under difficult circumstances, such as via rape or incest. At the same time, adoptive parents are generally encouraged to communicate openly with their children about their adoption stories and birth families. No research has examined the experiences of parents who adopt children who were conceived through rape or incest. This exploratory study examines how parents discuss their decision-making when adopting children conceived via rape or incest, how they manage varying levels of uncertainty about their children's origins, and whether and how they plan to disclose this information to children. The researchers used thematic analysis to examine the experiences of 11 couples (22 parents) interviewed at four time points after adopting children who were reportedly conceived via rape or incest. Findings revealed that even soon after adopting, parents discussed the need to eventually talk to their children about their conception circumstances. Parents generally struggled to determine how and when to disclose this information, particularly when they felt uncertain about the veracity of the conception stories they had been told. Some hoped to rely on professionals or birth mothers to guide them in these communications. Findings have implications for supporting adoptive families as they navigate the complexity of managing sensitive information and uncertainty when adopting children conceived through rape or incest. Practitioners should provide ongoing guidance to adoptive parents about how and when to disclose developmentally appropriate information to children about difficult conception circumstances.

Lightweight Accountable Privacy-Preserving Protocol Allowing the Cloud Client to Audit the Third-Party Auditor for Malicious Activities

Cloud computing is reserving its position in the market as the next disruptive utility paradigm. It is found on the pay-as-you-use model. Cloud computing is changing the way information technology (IT) operates for individuals as well as for companies. Cloud computing comes with different offerings to accommodate diverse applications. It comes with many successful adoption stories and a few unfortunate ones that are related to security breaches. Security concerns are what is making many companies reluctant to fully embrace the cloud realm. To enhance trust and entice adoption between cloud clients (CC) and cloud service providers (CSP), a new paradigm of depending on involving a third-party auditor (TPA) has been introduced. Hence, implementing a solution with a TPA comes with its toll in terms of trust and processing overhead. A lightweight security protocol to give the CC extra control with tools to audit the TPA and the CSP is paramount to the solution. In this paper, we are introducing a novel protocol: the lightweight accountable privacy-preserving (LAPP) protocol. Our proposed protocol is lightweight in terms of processing and communication costs. It is based on a newly introduced mathematical model along with two algorithms. We have conducted simulation experiments to measure the impact of our method. We have compared LAPP to the most eminent privacy-preserving methods in the cloud research field, using the open source cloud computing simulator GreenCloud. Our simulation results showed superiority in performance for LAPP in regard to time complexity, accuracy, and computation time on auditing. The aim of the time complexity and computation time on auditing simulations is to measure the lightweight aspect of our proposed protocol as well as to improve the quality of service.