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

研究将探索美国养母的工作的影响，这些养母跨国领养孩子，在YouTube上记录她们的家庭生活，并用这一活动产生的收入维持家庭。这部作品既反映并创造了广泛的、历史上存在的权力系统，也很少在父母创造的表现中提到或提到这些系统。在收养之前，孩子们被边缘化和脆弱得令人难以置信。在婴儿期，他们被亲生父母送进机构照顾，大多数人有智力或身体残疾。他们的父母正好相反：中产阶级的美国白人，能够筹集到国际收养所需的4万美元。来自这两个截然不同的生活世界的人走到一起的社会影响，通过母亲们创造的表现来阐明和复杂化。内容包含了一些重要的论述，涉及女性如何概念化和构建自己的白人和特权，以及领养子女的“他者”。这些内容是伦理问题的沃土，既涉及允许国际收养的新自由主义、新殖民主义背景和历史，也涉及一套价值观和信仰，这些价值观和信仰使记录被边缘化的孩子的形象并从中获利具有社会合法性。我将采取混合方法，进行数字民族志和数据分析。

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.