Adoption in the USA: The racialised digital representation & monetisation of children

In this thesis, I explore how children deemed eligible for adoption in the USA are represented and monetised by a range of digital ‘adoption advocates’, including governments, private adoption agencies and adoptive parents. Though there have been extensive studies on the racialised political economic forces that shape US adoption practices, and separate research into the racialised structures of digital technology, this thesis breaks new ground by considering how adoption practices are shaped by internet design and use. The thesis thus shows that the everyday realities experienced by children in the US adoption process are shaped by the intersections of racial, reproductive and digital forms of structural injustice. To make this argument, I draw on digital data collected over 12-month period, which I analyse using critical techno-cultural discourse analysis. Such analysis leads me to argue that digital ‘adoption advocacy’ is a diverse but sustained set of practices concerned with encouraging the placement of children, currently living in state care or with their birth families in a range of global locations, with adoptive parents in the USA. By using this framing, I connect the work of state governments (who share images and photographs of children in their care) to the work of adoptive parent social media influencers (who represent and monetise their everyday family life and their children’s perceived alterity). Drawing attention to the structural conditions of intersectional inequality that this representation and monetisation of children reflects and reproduces, I argue that the digital practices of ‘adoption advocates’ actively produce the inequalities that adoption in the USA relies upon. I show the significance of these digital practices by first placing them into a broader context, highlighting that representations of children of colour have been created by producers and for audiences occupying spaces of whiteness, throughout longer, non-digital histories. I then explore the relationship between ‘digital’ practices and the ‘non-digital’ material and embodied realities that such practices rely on and contribute to. The thesis does important work by showing the value of sustained engagement with an empirical case over time. It shows how structural forms of inequality shape the lives and experiences of a group of children whose personal information is repeatedly shared in the public domain, often without their knowledge or consent. In addition, by engaging reflexively with the power and inequality reflected in this empirical case, the thesis also explores the role that disciplinary social sciences can play in in identifying and challenging the reproduction of inequality.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Higgins, Isabelle

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• McPherson, Ella
• Meghji, Ali

• Digital Technology
• Sociology
• Sociology of Race and Racism

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/5dc48d91-e3da-494a-a677-951edcfc12cd/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.108899

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/368849