FILM FESTIVAL - Melbourne Transcultural Adoptee Film Festival & Panel
Fri 12-06-09, 10:00am - Sat 13-06-09, 5:00pm
AASRN members Indigo Willing and Dominic Golding invite you to the "Melbourne Transcultural Adoptee Film Festival & Panel" on Friday and Saturday, June 12-13, starting at 10:00am.
Event: Melbourne Transcultural Adoptee Film Festival & Panel
What: Convention Host: Adopted Vietnamese International's Facebook
Start Time: Friday, June 12 at 10:00am
End Time: Saturday, June 13 at 5:00pm
Where: Australian Catholic University (Melbourne campus: 115 Victoria Pde, Fitzroy).
The academic seminar is on Friday the 12th June, venue is Room 5.29, ACU, Melbourne City Campus. The seminar program is below.
The playreading of Umbilical, screening of films by intercountry adoptees and panel is on Saturday the 13th June in the Mercy Lecture Theatre, Young Street, ACU.
For more information, please contact Indigo (i.willing@uq.edu.au); and more about this project can be found at this site.
Adoption Research Seminar & Roundtable - Perspectives on local and intercountry adoption: Canada, US and Australia
Seminar Program
10.15 – 11.00: The US Enacts the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption: One Year In
Karen Balcom, McMaster University, Canada
The Hague Convention is the central international mechanism for the regulation of transnational adoption. Although the Convention was established in 1993, it was only in 2008 that the United States – the world's largest receiving country and a significant sending country in transnational adoption -- activated its Hague regulatory process. In this presentation, an historian of adoption in the United States places the Hague Convention in historical context, and discusses current challenges and issues to watch for as the Hague system in enacted in the US.
11.15 – 12.00: What shall we do with ‘poor little Chinky’? Race and adoption in Australia between the wars.
Shurlee Swain, Australian Catholic University
This paper will examine attitudes to race in interwar adoption when adoptive parents were in short supply. It argues that while non-white children were not explicitly excluded from adoptive placement, there was no expectation that they would be acceptable to Anglo-Australians who were assumed to want a child who could have been born as their own.
12.15 – 1.00: How can adoption be so bad for Australian children, yet so good for children born overseas?
Denise Cuthbert, Monash University
As reported in two significant reports of the House of Representative Standing Committee on Family and Human Services in 2005 and 2007, there is an entrenched ‘anti-adoption’ culture in Australia and, in particular, in the children’s services bureaucracies of state and territory governments. While domestic adoption appears to be the ‘poor relation’ of child protection and welfare policy, demand for intercountry adoption continues to exceed supply. In this paper, I turn to some aspects of the divergent histories of intercountry adoption and domestic adoption in Australia in an attempt to unravel contradictions in views and attitudes to adoption and its outcomes in its domestic and intercountry forms.
Afternoon session 2.15 – 3.30: Adoption Research Roundtable: Karen Balcom will initiate the roundtable with an overview of current and emerging trends in adoption research in Canada and the US. Denise Cuthbert will respond with Australian perspectives, to be followed by open discussion.
Please register intentions to attend this event with Amy Pollard. Numbers are required in order to secure tables for lunch. Contact Amy at: Amy.Pollard@arts.monash.edu.au
This event is supported by the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University and the Australian Catholic University
