9/2022: Adoptee Scholars

**This is a recording of our We the Experts event on September 10th, 2022.**

Adoptees share about their areas of study and research related to adoption.

Panelists

JaeRan Kim, Ph.D., MSW, (she/hers) is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work and Criminal Justice at the University of Washington at Tacoma. JaeRan’s research is focused on the wellbeing of adoptees, exploring disability, race, and transnational experiences for adoptees. JaeRan is passionate about engaging in community-based projects and has been blogging at Harlow’s Monkey, which focuses on the transracial/transnational adoptee experience, since 2006. JaeRan believes adoption research should center adoptees’ voices and experiences, and she is looking forward to sharing her perspectives in this panel.

Kit Myers is a transracial/national adoptee from Hong Kong. He is an assistant. professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. His research examines the violence of love in adoption, family, and kinship formations. Kit has published articles in Adoption Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, Adoption & Culture, and Critical Discourse Studies as well as co-edited a special issue on adoption and pedagogy. He serves on the executive committee for the Alliance for the Study of Adoption & Culture and worked with the Adoption Museum Project. ​​Kit is excited to be on the panel to discuss what he calls the violence of love and adoptees as knowledge producers.

Victoria (Torie) DiMartile is a speaker, consultant, and social science researcher passionate about lifelong learning and social change. Torie was transracially adopted as an infant and grew up in a white town, neighborhood, and school environment.Torie is the founder of Wreckage and Wonder LLC, a small business that provides transracial adoption education through one-on-one prospective adoptive parent consultations and group webinars. Torie is also a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Indiana University working towards a dissertation titled “Transracial Adoption in the Age of #GeorgeFloyd: Race and Kinship in U.S. Adoption.” She is excited to share about her experiences as an adoptee scholar and hear from others about their journey.

Kimberly McKee (she/her) is associate professor and chair of the integrative, religious, and intercultural studies department at Grand Valley State University. She is the author of Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2019) and co-editor of Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Her work also has been featured in Journal of Korean Studies, Adoption & Culture, Feminist Formations, and edited collections on transnational kinship and representations of Asian Americans. She serves as co-chair of the executive committee for the Alliance of the Study of Adoption and Culture. McKee received her Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from The Ohio State University.