Marginalised Children, Privileged Parents: An analysis of the 'work' of American adoptive mothers on YouTube

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Research will explore the implications of the work of American adoptive mothers who adopt children transnationally,document their family life on YouTube and sustain their family from the income this activity generates. This work bothreflects and creates wide ranging and historically situated systems of power that are rarely, if ever, alluded to oraddressed in the representations the parents create. Pre-adoption, the children are incredibly marginalised andvulnerable. In infancy they were placed by their birth parents into institutional care, and the majority have intellectual orphysical disabilities. Their parents are the opposite: middle-class, white Americans who are able to raise the $40,000needed to adopt internationally. The social implications of the coming together of individuals from these two very differentlifeworld's are elucidated and complicated by the representations the mothers create. The content contains importantdiscourse about how the women conceptualise and construct their own whiteness and privilege as well as the 'otherness'of their adopted children. The content is fertile ground for ethical questions, both about the neoliberal, neo-colonialcontext and history that allows for international adoption and the set of values and beliefs that make documenting andprofiting from representations of one's marginalised children socially legitimate. I will take a mixed-methods approach,carrying out digital ethnography and data analysis.