STATEN ISLAND, Feb. 21 — On Monday, March 5, at 3 p.m., author Hosu Kim will lecture on the adoption of Korean babies. The lecture will be held in Wagner College’s Main Hall, Room 22.
Kim, herself a Korean national, has studied the way the adoption of Korean babies is seen when viewed from either end of the transaction, said Wagner College sociology professor Jean Halley.
“In the U.S., Korean adoption is perceived as an ‘everybody wins’ arrangement — good for baby, birth mother and adoptive parents,” Halley said. “In Korea, however, women are sometimes pressured to surrender their children when they don’t really want to, for a variety of reasons.
“A Korean television show has won wide popularity by reuniting birth mothers with adopted children, live, on the air,” Halley said. “It is phenomena like this that Hosu Kim has studied.”
Kim, a graduate student in sociology at the City University of New York, is the author of “Mothers without Mothering: The Figure of Birth Mothers in Intercountry Adoption from South Korea to the U.S. Since the Korean War,” which will appear in a new book, “International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice,” edited by Kathleen Ja Sook Bergquist of the School of Social Work at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “International Korean Adoption” is scheduled for release at the end of next month by the Haworth Press of New York.
Kim is also the author of “The Parched Tongue,” which will appear in another new book, “The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social,” edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough, director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center, CUNY. “The Affective Turn” will be published in May by Duke University Press.
The public is welcome to attend Kim’s lecture.
For more information about Wagner College, visit us on the Web at www.wagner.edu.
