Research

My research agenda coheres around my interests in the meeting points of social impacts of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and historical context of contemporary lives. I use my training in qualitative and quantitative social sciences and in textual and archival analysis to produce scholarship that engages mixed methodologies from an interdisciplinary intellectual standpoint. I have presented my work at a variety of regional, national, international conferences, including the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, American Studies Association, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and National Women’s Studies Association conferences. I have also published a queer analysis of identity formation among queer polyamorous women in Sexualities, have edited roundtables and roundtable submissions forthcoming in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, and forthcoming book chapters in Transnational Perspectives of Sexual and Reproductive Rights (Routledge) and Sexuality, Human Rights, and Public Policy-An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Farleigh Dickinson). I am committed to engaging with potential interlocutors in many different disciplines and interdisciplines and this commitment shapes both my research and the audiences who may be receptive to that research.

 

Adoption, Foster Care, and Juvenile Justice (under contract with Routledge, co-authored with Dr. Tanya Saroj Bakhru)

Understanding practices of family separation and child removal necessitates considering the interlocking effects of racial capitalism, colonialism, empire building, and systemic racism. Reproductive Justice, Adoption, and Foster Care argues that situating the colonial legacies of family separation, what it means to center the right parent, and Reproductive Justice and transnational feminist frameworks in conversation with one another offers a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to recognizing the significance and impact of contemporary examples of family separation. This approach makes evident the connections between adoption and foster care with the intellectual and activist frameworks of human rights, Critical Adoption Studies, Reproductive Justice, and transnational feminisms. Epistemologically, Reproductive Justice and transnational feminisms meet at the point where both consider and interrogate globalizing capitalism, neoliberal economic and political ideologies, and the ways that various people—mostly people of color, poor people, women, children, and Indigenous people—are considered disposable. These processes work to undermine the public sphere so that social welfare networks “naturalize capitalist values as if they are inevitable.”[i] Critical Adoption Studies also importantly connects with transnational feminisms and human rights, as the field focuses on the ways that adoption and foster care function not only as forms of family formation, but as mechanisms of globalizing capitalism and state formation. Thus, it is critical that any exploration of the reproductive experiences of marginalized individuals interrogate and complicate notions of “choice” to advocate for justice.

Our book proposal for Reproductive Justice, Adoption, and Foster Care (advance contract, Routledge) centers the need to critically examine systems of care work through adoption and fostering. It brings together the work happening in Critical Adoption Studies, Reproductive Justice, transnational feminisms, and human rights. We argue that these frameworks must be in conversation with one another. In this book, we demonstrate that in order to understand practices of family separation and child removal we must consider the impacts of globalizing capitalism, colonialism, empire building, and the establishing and normalizing of systemic racism. Reproductive Justice, Adoption, and Foster Care contends that we must center the right to parent, and that Reproductive Justice and transnational feminist frameworks need to be in conversation with one another. In doing so, a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the significance and impact of contemporary family separation comes to light, which in turn supports building a new future where all children and families are truly valued.

This book will be informed by a variety of methods, including historical archival analysis, institutional ethnography, legal analysis, critical theory, and media analysis of child removals and family separation over a broad period of time. We will not be conducting interviews for the purpose of primary data (our interviews are instead those scholars’ intellectual and activist contributions to the book, attributed to them as interviews with the authors). Historical archival materials will be used for gathering information about the Korean Adoption Project and the Indian Adoption Project in the U.S., both government-sponsored programs in the 20th century to encourage American families, especially white American families, to adopt Korean and Indigenous adoptees, respectively. We will also gather news media coverage of adoption and foster care from the mid-20th century until today to outline how media representations of adoption and foster care framed public understandings of adoption and foster care as a part of “child saving” policies in the U.S. Institutional ethnography will encompass our analysis of the structures of foster care and adoption in the U.S.—a complicated set of structures to examine, as each U.S. state has different laws, guidelines, and institutional structures for both adoption and foster care, though foster care differs more state-to-state. Finally, we will gather together the legislation, legislative codes, and court decisions that shape adoption and foster care policy in the U.S. We will not need any specialized software for these methods.

Endnotes/Works Cited 

[i] Loretta Ross, Lynn Roberts, Erika Derkas, Whitney Peoples, and Pamela Bridgewater, “Introduction,” Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique, New YorkFeminist Press (2017): 21.

 

Future Research: The Kids Who Aren’t There: Indigenous Child Removal Through Compulsory Education, Adoption, and Juvenile Justice (on hold due to COVID-19)

My current project, The Kids Who Are(n’t) There: Indigenous Child Removal Through Compulsory Education, Foster Care, Adoption, and Juvenile Justice builds upon my dissertation research. I argue that the removal of Native children in eastern Washington State has been and continues to be a keystone of ongoing settler colonization. As explained further in my dissertation abstract, I use institutional ethnography as a method to engage with legal analysis, archival documents, and interviews to track the shifts in U.S. state policy regarding Native youth removal. These shifts encompass the use of three distinct systems—compulsory education in mission and boarding schools, adoption and foster care outside of family and tribal environments, and juvenile justice—to remove Native children as a part of the process of eliminating and assimilating indigenous ways of knowing and indigenous people. White ideals of gender roles and European understandings of kinship formations and sexual norms justified removals of Native children from the Spokane, Kalispel, and the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. The instruction of the proper white ideals of gender and sexuality were also central to the reeducation and assimilation projects of all three systems. The impacts of the three systems and the everyday understandings of race, citizenship, gender, and kinship that frame them are often examined separately from one another. However, I argue that these systems are discrete and yet connected arms of U.S. policy. This project has been recognized nationally and was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program in 2016.

The impacts of the three systems and the everyday understandings of race, citizenship, gender, and kinship that frame them are often examined separately from one another. However, I argue that these systems are discrete and yet connected arms of U.S. policy. Importantly, each of these projects participate in the creation of understanding of Native youth as “youth of color” or “minority youth.” Partly due to Native youth’s relatively small numbers as compared to other youth of color—Native people are less than 1% of the U.S. population—coding them as minority youth produces a situation where Native youth are less likely to have their situations examined. This means that, though Native youth are overrepresented in both the juvenile justice and foster care system, very little critical attention has come to why they might be overrepresented. I argue that data which combines analysis of the status of Native youth in with other racialized youth is, in part, done in the interest of making ongoing colonization less apparent. If Native people and children are statistically insignificant, then drawing any kind of critical conclusion about their status becomes impossible.

This project is the first to consider contemporary Native youth’s juvenile justice system involvement in the context of other settler state policies which impacted Native youth, families, and communities. This project considers the impacts of the transnational and state-to-state nature of all U.S. state engagements with Native youth. This project uses a mixed methodological engagement with historical archives; legal histories and judicial decisions; and interviews with Native youth involved in the justice system, Native adult adoptees who were adopted into white families, and with professionals in the legal and social services systems. I argue that the removal of Native youth from family and tribal homes were and remain central to the ongoing gendered and racialized project of settler colonization in the United States. Through this project, the connected logics of state-sponsored compulsory education, foster care and adoption, and juvenile justice have not only justified removal of Native children, but have shaped our very understandings of American citizenship, race, gender, and sexuality.

Connected to my primary project, I have also a chapter under contract in the edited volume Transnational Perspectives of Sexual and Reproductive Rights, edited by Dr. Tanya Saroj Bakhru. In “Indigenous Reproductive Justice after Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2013),” I analyze the 2013 Supreme Court decision to remove a Native child from her Native father’s custody and place her with a non-Native adoptive family chosen by her birth mother. Using reproductive justice as a lens, I explore the context of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 as not just a family-connection bill, but as a legislation which should provide protection for Native parents to have their children parented in indigenous homes. I argue that the Supreme Court’s decision shores up the foundations of a legal system which has never been interested in justice for Native people and which has developed in part out of a need to erode Native sovereignty and self-determination. This, I argue, is an issue of reproductive justice, of the ability of Native families to parent Native children.

 

Recent Publications:

* Indicates manuscripts co-written with students

 

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