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

项目摘要：ellen hermann设计的亲属关系：收养科学与现代美国的科学收养本项目通过解读20世纪美国儿童收养作为一项科学事业来探索科学在行动中的作用。它调查了心理学、行为遗传学、社会学、社会工作和人文科学领域的个人的工作，他们用现代的术语重新构想了一个古老的制度：作为人性科学的实验基础，或者作为一系列技术要求苛刻的操作，致力于身份和归属的系统架构。在这场将“生物学上的陌生人”变成亲人的交易中，科学专业人士看到了一个不同寻常的实验机会，一个具有挑战性的社会实验室，以及一系列复杂的操作，这些操作承诺了知识发现，也为有需要的儿童带来了希望。为什么研究人员转向收养，并坚持认为科学是一个以前从未科学过的社会制度的核心？收养回答了哪些科学问题？收养研究是如何进行的，从中提取的知识是如何随着时间的推移而变化的？理解收养是如何转变成一门科学的，说明了科学是如何运作的。理解科学是如何改变收养的，就能说明为什么科学很重要。被选为研究对象的个人跨越了整个世纪，来自一系列人文科学学科，并为科学和社会福利留下了重要的遗产。两种不同但相互关联的研究轨迹被有效地区分开来：收养科学和科学收养。收养科学通过使收养服务于科学世界来完善对人性的认识，而科学收养则通过使科学服务于收养世界来提高儿童和家庭的福利。收养科学家把收养作为一个探索先天/后天问题的机会，来探究人类是如何以及为什么会变成现在这样的。倡导科学收养的人一直在问，为了更有效地设计家庭，被收养者的表现如何。通过研究这两个研究领域的代表性工作，该项目将为现代人文科学的学术对话提供新的内容——设计亲属关系的例子，同时为收养亲属关系的研究增加了一个急需的科学维度。目前还没有历史研究探索20世纪美国人类科学家利用收养数据的各种方式，也没有人认为收养本身是社会设计和工程的一个重要案例。然而，收养体现了一种现代趋势，即把社会安排视为事实上的实验，把严格的科学学科引入现代生活中最普通、最亲密、最私密的角落——从家庭动态到性取向和自尊——所有这些都是以知识和公共利益的名义进行的。正因为如此，收养才成为我们思考现代科学专业人员的道德职业、科学与价值问题的交叉点以及科学合理化的社会进程的原始优势。这项研究将出版成书，特别有可能有助于我们理解社会工程、自然意识形态、生物科学与社会科学之间的交叉、基础科学与应用科学之间的复杂关系，以及决策者和公众对科学知识和研究的选择性利用。

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.