Paper abstracts
Panel 1: Histories
Between US Empire and Europe: Professional Social Work and South Korean Adoption’s Turn to Europe – Youngeun Koo (Lund University)
This paper examines how Europe emerged as a major receiving region for South Korean children in the late 1960s despite the absence of a European colonial relationship and otherwise limited economic, political, and social ties with South Korea. It centers Korean professional social workers—the first postwar generation trained through US-style, college-degree social work programs—and shows how they helped build the institutional channels and legitimating discourses that made this shift possible. While socioeconomic conditions in South Korea and Europe mattered, the paper argues that Cold War power relations also structured the field, particularly the asymmetrical US–ROK relationship often characterized as neocolonial. Crucially, rather than re-centering the US as the primary driver, it traces how US influence was mediated, adapted, and operationalized through South Korean professionalization and institutions, in ways that enabled Europe’s rapid incorporation into South Korea’s adoption system. In doing so, the paper clarifies Europe’s emergence while challenging the tendency to treat US-centered accounts as definitive in the historiography of transnational adoption. By foregrounding South Korean institutional and professional contexts, it sets the scene for the other panel contributions on distinct national trajectories across Europe.
The History of Korean Adoption to Norway and Denmark: A Brief Overview – Kasper Eriksen (European University Institute)
Historically, Norway and Denmark—together with Sweden—have had some of the highest rates of transnational adoption in the world when measured per capita, receiving the most children relative to their population size. Many of these children came from South Korea, which has sent approximately 6,500 and 9,000 children to Norway and Denmark respectively since around the 1960s. I will provide a brief overview of how these adoptions began and evolved during the 20th century, as well as recent revelations and developments in Denmark and Norway. I will discuss how Norwegian relief efforts during and after the Korean War created the physical and institutional connections between South Korea and Scandinavia that enabled the large-scale adoption of Korean children to these countries. I will also highlight the importance of South Korea as the major—and most organized—provider of adoptable children to Norway and Denmark, as well as the role of the Danish and Norwegian authorities.
Baby on Board: Legitimising Transnational Adoptions from South Korea to Belgium in the Wake of Asia's Hot War, 1960s–1970s – Chiara Candaele (NL-Lab/Huygens Institute (KNAW))
This talk centres on the historical development of transnational adoptions from South Korea to Belgium during the 1960s and 1970s. It foregrounds the interactions between diplomatic personnel, private philanthropists, NGO representatives, government officials and local intermediaries involved in the adoption and transfer of children. I argue that the reception of South Korean adoptees set a precedent for later governmental decisions on adoption policy and marked the beginning of a period in which legal immigration provisions for ‘adoptable’ children were progressively expanded and institutionalised. This presentation also underscores the critical role of medical imperatives in legitimating transnational adoptions. As a case study, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the historical entanglements between transnational adoption and humanitarian intervention, shedding light on the strategies that legitimised the permanent relocation of vulnerable children across borders at a time when such practices were deemed highly problematic within the international humanitarian community.
Adoptions from South Korea in West Germany – Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Since the 1960s, around 2,300 South Korean children have been adopted in West Germany.
One of the reasons for this relatively low number is the fact that the issue of transnational adoptions first came up in the context of the Vietnam War and the West German government did not approve of the adoptions of Vietnamese children. Possibly because of this rejection, transnational adoption is a rather marginal topic in the German public sphere. At the time, adoptions from South Korea did not take place in secrecy exactly, but somewhat ‘under the radar’. In my presentation, I will discuss the reasons for the official rejection of transnational adoptions by the West German administration, which I link to Germany’s own history as a sending country, and I will consider some of the consequences of the marginality of this history for adoption critique and adoption historiography.
Panel 2: Politics
The Exceptionalist Logics of Transnational Adoption in Denmark – Lene Myong (University of Stavanger)
Historically, narratives of Nordic exceptionalism (e.g. Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012, 2021) have shaped public and political perceptions of transnational adoption in the Scandinavian countries. Notions of the Scandinavian welfare states as egalitarian and racially tolerant societies, and (white) Scandinavian parents as uniquely suited to raise children of color, have imbued transnational adoption with an largely uncontested moral legitimacy. In this presentation, I reflect on how the rise of critical adoption activism in Denmark has eroded and challenged aspects of this legitimacy, thereby generating new political subjectivities and fault lines in adoption politics. At the same time, I consider how exceptionalist narratives about the adoptee subject are both continued and recalibrated in adoptees’ struggles for justice as well as in the political (pro-adoption) responses that seek to manage and contain these demands.
The Swedish Adoption World’s Reception of The Adoption Commission’s Final Report – Tobias Hübinette (Karlstad University)
In October 2021 the Swedish government committee of inquiry the Adoption Commission was appointed which handed over its final report to the current government in June 2025 after over three and a half years of work. The Adoption Commission investigated irregular and unethical adoptions to Sweden from the 1950s until today and it is a part of an ongoing global process of coming to terms with the past concerning transnational adoption. This presentation consists of a qualitative media text study examining how the final report of the Adoption Commission has been received by the Swedish adoption world’s three stakeholder groups in the form of the adoptive parents, the adoption organisations and the adoptees in relation to transitional justice theories. The study covers the time period from the release of report on June 2, 2025 to October 6 of the same year when the referral round ended and focuses on four recommendations and themes - an official apology, a resource centre, a new adoption system, and the issue of reparation and accountability.
Adoptee Activism in Bolivia and the Power of Public Intervention –Atamhi Cawayu (Universidad Católica Boliviana "San Pablo")
Adoptee activism has gained growing visibility and scholarly attention, particularly in relation to recent investigations into irregular adoption practices in Europe. Yet countries of origin have long been key sites of resistance, as seen in South Korea’s decades of adoptee organizing. Building on this lineage, this paper examines the work of returning Bolivian adoptees who, through public poster campaigns (2020, 2025), seek to challenge dominant adoption narratives and make visible the searches of adoptees and first families. Drawing on a semi-autoethnographic approach, it reflects on the author’s dual role as researcher and activist, and analyses public responses—including social media reactions—to these interventions. This paper agues the posters function as tools for reconnection and acts of abolitionist resistance against systems that have long erased adoptee and first family voices. In the absence of institutional recognition, these campaigns reclaim memory and kinship, opening space for collective healing and justice on adoptees’ own terms.