Pamela Anne Quiroz

From Finding the Perfect Love Online to Satellite Dating and ‘Loving-the-One-You’re Near’ A Look at Grindr, Skout, Plenty of Fish, Meet Moi, Zoosk and Assisted Serendipity

As an assistant professor I became interested in studying personal ads, in part because I perceived a lack of attention to this phenomenon by sociologists. In my view, we ceded explanation for the growth and outcome of this activity to psychologists, communications, and media scholars. More importantly, we failed to address the phenomenology of those who participated in placing personal ads. With some exceptions, I believe that this remains true. However, in a relatively brief period of time, what I call personal advertising, the impersonal public marketing of the self in a circumscribed medium, space, or place, has become a normative way of meeting people and establishing relationships. We know that modern personal advertising is linked to geographic mobility, demographic and cultural changes, occupational constraints, the limited success of more traditional dating methods, and innovations linked to twenty-first-century technology. Aside from the reality that people increasingly engage in alternative lifestyles and live longer, demographic trends indicate that the number of unmarried people has increased significantly, and this population

Cultural Tourism in Transnational Adoption “Staged Authenticity” and Its Implications for Adopted Children

The discursive practices of adoptive parents in two online transnational adoption forums (2006-2008) and observations of five international adoption workshops suggest that what Heather Jacobson described as culture keeping, the cultural socialization of children that retains a sense of native group identity, is more aptly characterized as cultural tourism, the selective appropriation and consumption of renovated cultural symbols, artifacts, and events that serve as the source of identity construction for adopted children. A feature of consumer capitalism, cultural tourism in transnational adoption helps shape the contours of cultural and racial identity. It also provides a partial understanding of how adopted children often fail to develop hybrid identities and how adult adoptees exist on the margins of two cultures.

From race matching to transracial adoption: race and the changing discourse of US adoption

Changes in US society have found their way into the adoption arena, resulting in new policies and participants in the adoption process and altering the discourse of adoption. Although the discourse of modern adoption has shifted, the legacy of race in adoption remains. Drawing on popular adoption literature, information in the public domain, and discussions in an adoption forum, this paper argues that despite efforts at reconstruction, racial inequalities are often reified in current adoption discourse, implemented through the very practices designed to help children. Interpreted both as a device for categorization and as discursive formation, the language of adoption continues to empower some groups and disempower others. The Internet presents a zone of possibility for reconstructing relations of power in adoption via symbolic and linguistic resources as asymmetries between adoption participants are contested and reconstructed.

Marketing diversity and the ‘new’ politics of desegregation: overview of an urban education ethnography

Situating ethnographic methods within a framework of engaged research we offer a window into the adoption, implementation, and sociopolitical dilemmas of 15 African American males participating in a program designed to maintain diversity at one of Chicago’s most successful and elite public high schools. The article presents a four-year study (2007–2011) of an explicitly class-based and implicitly race-based attempt to engage the ‘new’ politics of desegregation and the microprocesses of integration. Promoted as reaching across geographic, race, and class boundaries, the Black Male Achievement Initiative (BMAI) at Selective Preparatory Academy (SPA) is just one of many attempts to satisfy stakeholders in a political environment that promotes school choice and voluntary initiatives to desegregate schools. Situated within the local context of Chicago school reform, the BMAI provides opportunities and builds relationships even as it raises questions about racial formation, the appropriation of space, the meaning of diversity, and how such educational programs are part of the broader processes of gentrification.

Transnational adoption: reflections of the diaper diaspora : On reconfiguring race in the USA

Purpose – Popularly viewed as a humanitarian issue that transcends not only geopolitical boundaries of nationality but also sociopolitical borders of race, the ways in which transnational adoption reflects the racialization of children are often ignored. Because adoption is not a random process of family building but rather a purposive endeavor that involves the multiple dynamics of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and disability, it is important to recognize how trends in transnational adoption intersect with shifting racial structure. This paper aims to examine visas issued to orphans entering the USA from 1990‐2005, international programs offered by US adoption agencies, and juxtaposes these with policies governing adoption in sending countries to illustrate how transnational adoption mirrors these emerging racial categories.Design/methodology/approach – Using the tripartite racial framework argued to characterize the shifting US racial structure, the author located adoptions in the top 20 sendi...

School as solution to the problem of urban place Student migration, perceptions of safety, and children’s concept of community

This case study explores how student migration impacts low-income fourth grade African American and Latino children in the US who leave their neighborhoods to attend a state-of-the-art facility in a downtown urban area. Children at the World Citizens School (WCS) convey how safety plays a key role in their restrictions by parents and in their daily lives in a near total institutional environment. The use of multiple methods show how the social relations of community are modified by student migration and how one community is displaced by another.

Restorative justice and the impact of the Hague Convention on US transnational adoption

The concept of restorative justice (RJ) has been extended beyond a focus on crime to such areas as education, the workplace, and the family. Recent efforts of the US to implement the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption provide an opportunity to examine RJ values as components of transnational adoption policy. If we accept Braithwaite’s suggestion to think of RJ in terms of avoiding harm rather than in terms of doing good then we can surely think of the Hague Convention as a restorative instrument as principles involving social justice and human rights align with principles of RJ to circumvent human rights abuses and to monitor conflicts in transnational adoption. Though written and signed by 83 countries in 1993, the US did not ratify the Hague Convention until 2007 and implementation of the Hague Convention began in April, 2008. Drawing from US Department of State data on transnational adoptions, political and social changes specific to sending countries, shifts in sending country adoption policies, and changes in the marketing of programs by private adoption agencies, this paper assesses the impact of the Hague Convention on transnational adoption generally, and US transnational adoption in particular.