Citation:

McGettrick, born Lorraine Hughes, C. (2024) Making Up Adopted People: Pathologisations in Adoption Psychology and the Shaping of Adoption Policies and Identities. PhD Dissertation. University College Dublin.

ABSTRACT

Adoption knowledge is primarily constructed by scholars in the psychological sciences, and by social workers and social work academics. Through these bodies of knowledge, the adopted person has become known as a specific type of individual, while the adopted population has come to be governed and managed as a distinct social group. Yet, although the adoption field now boasts a vast body of literature, the impact of expert knowledge on adoption policy and practice has largely been overlooked. There has also been limited analysis of adoption knowledge construction processes and dynamics. These include the positionality of experts and their disciplinary inclinations, as well as the research aims, designs, questions, methodologies, and findings they deploy.

Making Up Adopted People analyses the construction and circulation of a particular kind of expert psychological knowledge with respect to adopted people. It positions adoption as a biopolitical strategy, which elucidates the truth-power-subjectivity relations of the field. The project situates itself in, and contributes to, two main fields— adoption and sociology (especially the sociology of the psychological sciences). Drawing upon work in the Foucauldian tradition, particularly that of Nikolas Rose and Ian Hacking on the contemporary psychological sciences, the dissertation examines and analyses the processes of expert knowledge construction, contestation and circulation with respect to adoption and adopted people. Availing of mostly public published sources, the dissertation excavates the foundations and subsequent development of adoption psychological knowledge. It explores how adopted people first became objects of knowledge and reconstructs the emergence of ideas about adopted people’s psychological vulnerability during the twentieth century. In so doing, the dissertation demonstrates that the field of adoption psychology was built on psychopathological underpinnings that have shaped its conceptual infrastructure from the inception of the field up to the present day. Using a biopolitical footing, Making Up Adopted People problematises the dominant conceptual grids in the field of adoption research. Its analyses illuminate patterns and dynamics that have hitherto been obscured in the official chronologies of the field. By introducing disturbances in the epistemological landscape, the dissertation challenges prevailing paradigms, presumptions, research findings, and interpretations.

Finally, while the research takes inspiration from critical scholarship in adoption and the sociology of the psychological sciences, it also constructs a new space. In this regard, the dissertation takes a constructive approach, and proposes an alternative conceptual framework, termed Critical Adoption Theory (CAT), within which adoption and the experiences of adopted people can be understood. In taking steps towards an alternative paradigm, the project elucidates avenues of exploration that have hitherto been neglected. Both Making Up Adopted People and CAT seek to divert the expert gaze away from adopted people’s purported pathologies and towards the deeply embedded structural deficiencies and harms that impact on the lives of these individuals.