Professionalizing Care: Experts, Empire, and the Transnational Making of International Adoption in Cold War South Korea
Thursday · May 18 · 4 PM (Pacific Time)
UCI Humanities Gateway 1010
Register: https://forms.gle/G9dcymzYB3SdC4z96
This talk recounts the story of the world’s longest-running and largest international adoption program from the perspective of the first generation of professional social workers in postwar South Korea. Based on her book in progress, tentatively titled Experts of Care: International Adoption and the Making of South Korean Modernity, 1961–1979, Koo offers a critical analysis of care that embeds this program in a historical process that emerged out of a complex network of power and dependency among Western humanitarians, Korean social workers, and the authoritarian state under Park Chung Hee. In particular, this talk analyzes multiple, transnational negotiations and tensions related to the care of “abandoned” children. Koo critically examines and denaturalizes the relationship between international adoption and child abandonment, a problem from which South Korea had suffered throughout the 1960s. In contrast to other scholarly treatments of this phenomenon, she argues that international adoption was not merely an outcome of South Korea’s compressed modernization or neocolonial relations with the United States. Rather it, and care more broadly, served as a formative site of South Korean modernity, where questions of self-determination, development, and the Cold War were fiercely negotiated. Based on archival research in six countries, oral history interviews with professionals, and examination of personal adoption files, Koo’s research peels back the multi-layered, often contradictory processes involved in the making of an international adoption program that shaped the lives of 200,000 Korean adoptees and their families. In so doing, it provides a critique of the presumed promise of humanitarian interventions and developmentalist projects, which continue to be durable frameworks in conceptions of the global community as a moral order.
Youngeun Koo is currently a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Her research has to date focused on the transnational politics of care, the history of international humanitarianism, and postcolonial social governance, focusing on the case of South Korean international adoption. She has an interdisciplinary and transnational background and obtained her PhD in Korean Studies (summa cum laude) from the University of Tübingen in 2022. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies. In addition to her research, Koo also supports transnational adoptees in reclaiming their histories and contributes to the state investigations of international adoption that have been recently launched in South Korea, Sweden, and Denmark.