Contingent Kinship

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, <I>Contingent Kinship</I> charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of &ldquo;intimate speculation,&rdquo; a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption&rsquo;s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption&mdash;and the families it produces&mdash;possible.<BR /> &#160;