Call for Proposals:

Sixth Biennial Conference for the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture

ASAC 2016: Building Communities, Changing Discourses

Crowne Plaza Minneapolis Northstar Downtown Hotel, 27-29 October 2016

Organized by the ASAC Selection Committee: Cynthia Callahan and Margaret Homans (co-chairs), Emily Hipchen, Claudia Nelson, Kim Park Nelson, Marianne Novy, Carol Singley
Twin Cities Site Committee: Kim Park Nelson (chair), Sara Docan-Morgan, Shannon Gibney, Lisa Medici, Robert O’Connor, Anne Jin Soo Preston, Elizabeth Raleigh

Keynote speakers: Lorraine Dusky, Margaret Jacobs, and Deann Borshay Liem, introducing her new film, Geographies of Kinship. Also staged readings by Mu Performing Arts tracing twenty years of adoption theater in the Twin Cities.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers or 75-minute panels (Q&A included) that:

•  Analyze literary, cinematic, dramatic, musical, visual, dance, popular culture, or performance art approaches to new ways (whether present, past, or future) of conceiving community in adoption, foster care, or other nonstandard means of family formation or childcare.
•  Study the dynamics between adoption communities and other reproductive, family and caring structures from historical, anthropological, philosophical, sociological, legal, religious, political, racialized, gendered, LGBTQ, and/or psychological perspectives.
  Study the discourses employed in narratives of the lives of adoptees, foster alumni, adoptive parents, foster parents and/or birthparents, and how these discourses may be seen as innovative for their time period.
•  Promote community between people positioned differently with regard to adoption because of their life experience, profession, and/or discipline.

We also invite creative presentations (writing, film, drama, graphic arts, other media, etc.) on the conference theme in relation to adoption.

If you would like to be considered as a presenter of your adoption-related creative writing at the Loft Literary Center event on 28 October, please send no more than five pages of your published work to the event’s curator, Shannon Gibney, at shannongibney@gmail.com by the conference submission deadline.

Please send 200-word proposals for papers or samples of creative work, a cv or resume along with your proposal, and links if you are working in visual or multimedia, to asac.conference@gmail.com; use this address also for queries. Send your proposal, cv, and/or writing sample in an electronic file with a title including your last name.

Proposal deadline 1 March 2016

If you are a graduate student and would like to be considered for a travel grant award (maximum value $500), please indicate this on your proposal and submit an expanded proposal of 1200-1500 words. Awards will be given based on the quality of the paper proposal, cost of travel, contribution of paper to the scope of the conference, and available funds.