Forschungsprojekte
Adoption is one variety of “extended families” and common cultural practice with a long, diverse historical tradition. During the last decades, it has been subject of discussion in various societal contexts: debates on kinship denaturalization and diversification, disputes on same-sex marriage and adoption rights, public scandals on illegal child trafficking in context of intercountry adoption, or adoption as “expiring alternative” with view to improved reproductive technologies. Adoption is a form of (post)modern kinship formation located at the intersection between nature and nurture, individual practice and social administration, private concern and state responsibility, eventually regulation. My PhD project takes these tension fields as starting point to analyze the historical development of adoption discourses and practices in West Germany after 1945 to investigate how societal ideas of parenthood, family and kinship, in broader sense of social belonging and social order, of norms and normalization, were renegotiated.