Introduction: Waiting for a Better World: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Intercountry Adoption

Abstract

Consider a social phenomenon which for over sixty years has seen the increasingly systematic and organised (but involuntary) expatriation, migration and resettlement of around one million children around the globe (Selman, 2012). In most cases, this expatriation entails the complete severance of ties with home countries, communities and families of origin; the provision of new families and citizenship; a legal change of identity that may include the issuing of new birth certificates; and, for many, a life among people from whom they remain visibly different just as they remain culturally and linguistically different from the communities in which they were born but from whom they are removed at an early age.