MNHRC Presents: Love, care and overcoming disability in American adoption
MNHRC Fall Speaker Event
November 18, 2021
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location
Virtual Event
Calendar
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This presentation will explore the discourse of love and acceptance that adoption professionals used in postwar America to adopt children with disabilities. Framing adoptive applicants’ decision to adopt and parent a disabled child as a process of “overcoming” reflected a shift in the way professionals viewed the very purpose of adoption. Whereas before, adoption solved the needs of childless parents, now it served the child’s need for a stable family. This new approach to adoption practice required prospective adoptive parents to consciously choose a child with a disability and then actively work to achieve a cohesive family unit.
Presented by:
Sandy Sufian, PhD, UIC College of Medicine, UIC College of Applied Health Sciences
Dr. Sufian is a professor of Health Humanities, History, and Disability Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine and the College of Applied Health Sciences. Her forthcoming book with University of Chicago Press (winter 2021) is entitled: "Familial Fitness: Adoption, Disability and Family in Modern America," where she describes the historical trajectory of exclusion to partial inclusion of children with disabilities in American adoption. As a disability studies scholar, Sufian studies how biological and contextual factors interact to shape disability and illness experiences. Sandy is specifically interested in the areas of family and kinship, sexual and reproductive health, chronic illness, and best-practices for patient-centered outcomes research. She teaches graduate and medical students about patient-centered and contextual care, social aspects of illness and disability, and the social and structural determinants of health.
RSVP below. A Zoom link will be provided upon registration.
Date posted
Oct 12, 2021
Date updated
Oct 31, 2022