Pitt to Host Encountering New Worlds of Adoption: The Second International Conference on Adoption and Culture, Oct. 11-14

PITTSBURGH-Encountering New Worlds of Adoption: The Second Annual Conference on Adoption and Culture, to be held at the University of Pittsburgh Oct. 11-14, will explore how adoption is redefining family, parenthood, and identity, and how adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents are redefining adoption.

The conference will be held in the Cathedral of Learning, 4200 Fifth Ave., Frick Fine Arts Building, 650 Schenley Dr., and Wesley W. Posvar Hall, 230 S. Bouquet St. For information,

e-mail adoptnew@pitt.edu or visit www.english.pitt.edu/events/AdoptionandCulture/index.html.

The conference will feature three keynote addresses and three film presentations. Among the 80 speakers are literary critics, writers, anthropologists, philosophers, historians, sociologists, legal theorists, psychologists, filmmakers, and activists from Spain, Norway, China, Russia, England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, among other countries.

Marianne Novy-Pitt Professor of English, cochair of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption, Identity, and Kinship, and editor of the organization's newsletter, herself an adoptee-will convene the conference. She is author of "Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama" (University of Michigan Press, 2005).

As suggested by the variety of disciplines represented and the title of Novy's book, the discussion topics are far-reaching and will cover such issues as transnational and transracial adoption, open adoption, adoptee identity, legislation about birth records, same-sex and special-needs adoption, relinquishment, blog dialogues between adoptive and birth mothers, and adoption novels and history.

Novelist Emily Prager will deliver the first keynote address titled "Adoption-A Two-Way Street," at 8 p.m. Oct. 11 in Room 501, Cathedral of Learning. Also a humor writer and award-winning journalist, Prager is author of "Wuhu Diary: On Taking My Adopted Child Back to Her Hometown in China" (Random House, 2001).

Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law at Northwestern University, will present the Oct. 12 keynote address titled "Adoption and Culture: The Difference Politics Makes," at 1:45 p.m. in Room 125, Frick Fine Arts Building. Roberts is author of the award-winning "Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty and Shattered Bonds" (Pantheon, 1997).

Filmmaker Jean Strauss is well known within the adoption community as the author of "Birthright: The Guide to Search and Reunion for Adoptees, Birthparents, and Adoptive Parents" (Penguin, 1994) and her memoir, "Beneath a Tall Tree" (Arete-USa Pub Co, 2001). Two of her award-winning short films will be shown Oct. 12, Vital Records (2005), which illuminates the debate on access to original records for adoptees, at 5 p.m., and, as part of the "Evening of Adoption Memoir, Poetry, and Film" session, "The Triumvirate" (2005), which documents her reunion with her birthmother and birth grandmother, at 8 p.m., both in Room 125, Frick Fine Arts Building.

Susan Bordo, professor of English and Gender and Women Studies who holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky, will deliver the final keynote address titled "Will the 'Real' Parent (s) (s) (s) (s) Please Step Forward?: Beyond Our Fantasies and Fears About Open Adoption," at 11 a.m. Oct. 13 in Room 332, Cathedral of Learning. An adoptive mother in an open transracial adoption, Bordo has written many books including the award-winning "Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body" (University of California Press, 1993) and "The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private" (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999).

Filmmaker Phil Bertelsen will show and discuss his Paul Robeson Award-winning film "Outside Looking In: Transracial Adoption in America" (2001), at 8 p.m. Oct. 13 in Room 125, Frick Fine Arts Building. Bertelsen was transracially adopted in the 1970s, and in this film, as the writer and director, he explores his own experience; that of his 11-year old nephew, also transracially adopted; and that of a Midwestern White couple adopting an African American child in 2001.

Friday morning plenary session topics are "International Adoption" and "Adoption and Its Challenges." Speakers include Barbara Yngvesson, professor of anthropology at Hampshire College; Sara Dorow, professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, Canada, and author of "Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship" (New York University Press, 2006); Sandra Patton-Imani, associate professor at Drake University and author of "BirthMarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America" (New York University Press, 2000); Signe Howell, professor of anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, and the author of "The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective" (Berghahn, 2006); Judith Schachter (Modell), professor of anthropology and history at Carnegie Mellon University and author of "Kinship With Strangers: Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture" (University of California Press, 1994) and "A Sealed and Secret Kinship" (Berghahn, 2002); and Sally Haslanger, professor of philosophy and women's studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and coeditor of "Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays" (Cornell University Press, 2005).

Professor Robert McCall and associate professor Christina Groark, codirectors of Pitt's Office of Child Development who have studied children in Russian orphanages to understand long-term caregiver-child relationship building, will show and discuss their video, "Faces of Promise and Hope," at 5 p.m. Oct. 12, Room 5130 Posvar Hall. The showing follows the 3:15 p.m. session "Adoption in Russia," chaired by Pitt history professor Irina Livezeanu, which features presentations by McCall; Groark; Lilia Khabibullina, professor in the University of Barcelona; and Richard Wirick, lawyer and author of "One Hundred Siberian Postcards" (Telegram, 2007).

Other plenary sessions include anthropologists' discussions of international adoption and readings by adoption memoirists, including Betty Jean Lifton, adoption counselor, activist, and author of "Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter" (McGraw-Hill, 1975); birth mothers Lorraine Dusky, journalist, open records advocate, and author of Birthmark (M. Evans & Co., 1979), Sheila Ganz, filmmaker of the documentary Unlocking the Heart of Adoption (2001), and Mary Anne Cohen, editor of "Origins: A Birthmothers' Newsletter;" adoptee Jan Beatty, director of Creative Writing at Carlow University and author of Boneshaker (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002) and "Mad River" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), winner of an Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; and adoptive parents Jeanne Marie Laskas, Pitt assistant professor and author of "The Exact Same Moon" (Bantam, 2003) and Growing Girls (Bantam, 2006), and Nancy McCabe, assistant professor and director of the writing program at Pitt Bradford and author of "Meeting Sophie: A Memoir of Adoption" (University of Missouri Press, 2003).

Additional speakers of interest include Ralph Savarese, professor of English at Grinnell College in Iowa, reading from "Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption" (Other Press, 2007) about raising an adopted son with autism; Joyce Maguire Pavao, founder and CEO of the Center for Family Connections and the Adoption Resource Center; and Chris Winston, who began the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network.

All sessions are free to Pitt faculty, staff, students, and those of cosponsoring institutions: Carnegie Mellon, Carlow, Chatham, and Duquesne universities. The plenary sessions are free to the public, but the nonplenary sessions have a $50-$75 registration fee. Continuing Education Units are available through Pitt's School of Social Work. For more information and a complete list of conference sponsors, visit http://www.english.pitt.edu/events/AdoptionandCulture/sponsors.html

###

9/26/07/tmw