CALL FOR PAPERS (may also be downloaded, see the attached .pdf file at bottom)
Journal of Korean Adoption Studies
Deadline for submissions:
1 September 2009
This is a call for papers for the second issue of the newly established Journal of Korean Adoption Studies. The second issue of the journal is focused on alienation, both racial alienation in the West and cultural alienation in Korea, as a shared experience of many Korean adoptees.
We might define alienation as fundamentally a form of self-alienation, i.e. an individual subject’s alienation from him- or herself. More specifically, forms of alienation include various experiences of racialization of the private sphere, a discovery that the story about your past has been forged or altered, an encounter with completely strange people that supposedly are your birthparents…
The notion of alienation, however, is not simply descriptive. It implies a future-oriented perspective leading to de-alienation. The process of de-alienation involves not only an intellectual effort to analyze and understand the root causes of the alienated situation, but it also implies a practical effort to change the concrete situation.
Theoretically, the notion of alienation enables us to synthesize a number of separate issues such as experiences of racialization in the West, the right to access adoption records, and the efforts to strengthen the unity of the transnational adoptee community.
The most important perspective, however, might be to establish a clear link between a shared experience of alienation and the need to overcome alienation. How is adoptee de-alienation possible? What will de-alienation of the adoptee community imply? What are the specific strategies needed to achieve adoptee de-alienation on an individual as well as a collective level?
The theme of the second issue of Journal of Korean Adoption Studies is alienation. We invite you to submit scholarly papers as well as creative work related to Korean adoption studies. We also welcome papers that are related to Korean adoption studies, but do not particularly deal with alienation.
____________________
Journal of Korean Adoption Studies is dedicated to all aspects of international adoption from Korea. The peer-reviewed journal welcomes academic essays, testimonies of adoption, illustrations, and reviews of new publications or releases related to Korean adoption studies.
The bi-annual journal is published in English and Korean. Academic essays are expected to follow the standard North American MLA style (see MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th edition).
Editor: Kim Su Rasmussen, Denmark, Ph.D. in History of Ideas, Seoul National University. Journal of Korean Adoption Studies is published by the Korean adoptee organization Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.’L), Seoul, Korea.
