Kinship by Design: Adoption Science and Scientific Adoption in Modern America

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PROJECT ABSTRACT: SES 00-94318Ellen HermanKinship by Design: Adoption Science and Scientific Adoption in Modern AmericaThis project explores science in action by interpreting child adoption as a scientific enterprise in the 20th-century United States. It investigates the work of those individuals--in psychology, behavioral genetics, sociology, social work, and the human sciences generally--who reimagined an ancient institution in modern terms: as an experimental basis for the science of human nature, or as a series of technically demanding operations devoted to the systematic architecture of identity and belonging. In a transaction that turns "biological strangers" into kin, scientific professionals have seen an unusual experimental opportunity, a challenging social laboratory, and a series of intricate operations that promise intellectual discovery as well as hope for children in need. Why did researchers turn to adoption and insist that science was central to a social institution that had never been scientific before? What scientific questions did adoption answer? How were adoption studies conducted and how did the knowledge extracted from them change over time? Understanding how adoption was transformed into a science illuminates how science works. Understanding how adoption was transformed by science illuminates why science matters. Individuals selected for study span the entire century, are drawn from a range of human science disciplines, and have left significant legacies for science and social welfare. Two distinctive but interrelated research trajectories are usefully distinguished: adoption science and scientific adoption. Adoption science refines knowledge of human nature by making adoption serve the scientific world, while scientific adoption aims to enhance child and family welfare by making science serve the adoption world. Adoption scientists have used adoption as an opportunity to explore the nature/nurture problem, to ask how and why human beings turn out as they do.Advocates of scientific adoption have asked how adoptees turn out in order to design families more effectively. By examining representative work in these two fields of inquiry, this project will contribute new content--examples of kinship by design--to the scholarly conversation about the modern human sciences at the same time that it adds a much-needed scientific dimension to studies of adoptive kinship. There currently exists no historical study that explores the various ways 20th -century American human scientists have utilized adoption data, nor has anyone considered adoption itself as an important case of social design and engineering. Yet adoption exemplifies the modern tendency to view social arrangements as de facto experiments that invite the exacting discipline of science into the most ordinary, intimate, and private corners of modern life--from family dynamics to sexual orientation and self-esteem--all in the name of knowledge paired with the public good. This is what makes adoption an original vantage point from which to consider the moral careers of modern scientific professionals, the intersections of science and questions of value, and the social course of scientific rationalization.This study, which will result in a book, has particular potential to contribute to our understanding of social engineering, ideologies of nature, border-crossings between the biological and social sciences, the complex relationship between basic and applied science, and the selective utilization of scientific knowledge and research by policy-makers and the public at large.