History

The Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC) officially formed, through a constitution established in 1998, under the name The Alliance for the Study of Adoption, Identity, and Kinship. ASAC promotes understanding of the experience, institution, and cultural representation of domestic and transnational adoption and related practices such as fostering, assisted reproduction, LGBTQ+ families, and alternative kinship formations. ASAC considers adoptive kinship to include adoptees, first families, and adoptive kin. ASAC provides a forum for interdisciplinary, culture-based scholarly study and creative practice that consider many ways of perceiving, interpreting, and understanding adoption.

We began with a Modern Language Association (MLA) CFP in 1993, frequent unofficial meetings at the MLA annual conference, a special session and a special event approved in 1996, a constitution in 1998, and a newsletter in 1999. We held our first interdisciplinary conference at the University of Tampa in November 2005, and have held one about every other year since (2020’s conference was postponed to 2021). Our conferences, like all our forums, are interdisciplinary and include scholars working across and in many fields, such as literature, art, philosophy, anthropology, sexuality studies, film, theory, law, history, gender studies, disability studies, race studies, political science, genetics, and so forth.