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Research Methodology

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Key Themes:

colonization
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Self-representation of one’s own story is essential, especially when considering that through adoption, the child “is given a (new) name, language, religion, cosmology, worldview; she is, in a sense, colonized” (Collier 212).
Migration
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The migratory experience is often characterized by melancholy. Polish philosopher Zofia Rosinska, in her essay, “Emigratory Experience: The Melancholy of No Return,” states: “Analysis of the migratory experience shows that, at least in part, it contains traits typical of melancholy: the sense of estrangement, sadness, and loss, and the want of meaning in life” (36).
intercultural practice
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"Increasingly, experiences of migration and return, and transnational family practice, make their appearance in the life histories and imaginaries of Latin Americans. Roots, nostalgia and maintaining ties to the land and people of one's birth shift in meaning as the diaspora from that land swells in number and occupies new niches. Such phenomena introduce further levels of complexity into the questions of identity, racism, ethnic boundaries, and social hierarchy..." (Anderson 196).
Archives
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"Within an archive, documents may well serve to keep memories in motion; at the same time, the archive can also be the place where memories become frozen and inert. Yet, without archived testimony, memory will sooner or later expire. Both states are states of stasis; in other words, within or without the archive, stasis is the end of memory and movement its condition. Archives required the motion of bodies sifting through their contents and moving them about, literally unsettling the dust that tends to collect. Assumed to be the most stable of locations, archives are, in the end, surprisingly mobile" (Creet 22).
mediation
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“It is only when the contents of a medium are transposed onto a different medium,” says media theorist Swagato Chakravorty, “that the original medium becomes perceptible, in the sense that we are made aware of the parameters of the original medium when a different medium brings them into focus” (web). The adoptee is an active participant in this process of remediating documents.
memory study
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Sociologist Barbara Misztal posits that memory is “a highly important element in the account of what it is to be a person, as it is the central medium through which identities are constituted”. “Mitzal suggests that the destruction of what she terms ‘traditional identities’, conjoined with the need for collective identity, has resulted in an emphasis on the significance of memory” (Reading 383-384).
trauma
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"Perhaps what we are facing with the advent of the interactive archive is the emergence of new constellations of communities of memory, brought together by the wish and will to remember. To the extent this prospect is plausible, traumatic memory, like the new archival forms of collective memory, might also become a matter of elective affinities" (Pinchevski 263).
mediated identities
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"The synergetic force of digitization and globalization are changing human memory forms, languages and practices as well as challenging established conceptualizations of memory. Digitization enables new connectivities and assemblages of memories in unevenly globalized and localized contexts" (Reading 380).

ORAL HISTORY AND ARCHIVAL METHODS:

Both oral history and personal archival methods hold the most importance for this project because they speak to the past, present, and future. Oral history methods were used to interview the caregivers of this story. An oral history interview records the life history of its interviewer. Reflexivity between the narrator and the interviewer is a very important process in this type of practice. The archival process included: interaction, assemblage, data organization, and the contextualization of documents and experiences by the caregivers. The personal archive is a useful repository to organize, showcase, collect information, and tell stories that might not otherwise be told.

Oral History Interviews with Caregivers

Amable Portrait_square

Amable / Birth Mother

Interviewed by Angela Sharp, January 15, 2015 in Ecuador

Mom & Angela baby

Maryanne / Adopted Mother

Interviewed by Sara Sinclair, December 1, 2013 in Brooklyn, NY

MarthaSwing_IMG_6601_web

Martha / Orphanage Founder

Interviewed by Angela Sharp, January 7, 2015 in Ecuador

Mediagraphy

Anderson, Jeanine. "Assembling and Disassembling Families." The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 14.1 (2009): 185-198. Print.

Cook, Terry. “Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms." Archival   Science 13.2-3 (2013): 95-120. Print.

Chakravorty, Swagato. “mediation.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. The University of Chicago, n.d. Web. 27 March 2014.

Collier, Rachel Quy. “Performing Childhood.” Outsiders within: writing on transracial adoption. Eds. Jane Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin. Cambridge: South End Press, 2006. 212. Print.

Creet, Julia. “The Archive as Temporary Abode.” Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies. Eds. Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 280-298. Print.

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print.

Ernst, Wolfgang. “Dis/continuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multi-Media Space?” New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. Ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan. New York: Routledge, 2006. 105- 120. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.  New York: Random House, 1994. Print.

Hedstrom, Margaret. “Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past.” Archival Science 2 (2002): 21-43. Print.

Howell, Signe. “Self-Conscious Kinship: Some Contested values in Norwegian Transnational Adoption.” Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Eds. Sara Franklin and Susan McKinnon. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. 214- 223. Print.

Jones, Owain, and Joanne Garde-Hansen, eds. Geography and Memory.  Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

Ketelaar, Eric. “Archives as Spaces of Memory.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 29.1 (2008): 9-27. Print.

Kirsch, Gesa E., and Liz Rohan, eds. Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Print.

Misztal, Barbara A. Theories of Social Remembering. Philadelphia: Open University Press. 2003. Print.

Pinchevski, Amit. “Archive, Media, Trauma.” On Media Memory: collective memory in a new media age. Eds. Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg.  Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 253- 264. Print.

Posocco, Silvia. “Expedientes Fissured Legality and Affective States in the Transnational Adoption Archives in Guatemala.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 7.3 (2011): 434-456. Web. 18 November 2013.

Reading, Anna. “Identity, memory and cosmopolitanism: the otherness of the past and a right to memory?” European Journal of Cultural Studies 14.4 (2011): 379-394. Print.

Rosinka, Zofia. “Emigratory Experience: The Melancholy of No Return.”  Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies. Eds. Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 31-42. Print.

Sherratt, Tim, and Kate Bagnall. Invisible Australians. n.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2013. http://invisibleaustralians.org/blog/

Stoler, Ann Laura. Haunted By Empire. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Print.