Ashley E. Kim Duffey

My dissertation, “(Re)visioning Kinship: Photographies of U.S.–Korean Adoption since 1953,” engages the many genres of photographic production related to U.S.–Korean adoption. Examining this transnational phenomenon from its roots in the Korean War (1950–1953) to the present day, I offer four thematically and chronologically organized chapters that treat: Cold War-era military and popular press photography of waifs and orphans in the Republic of Korea; the bureaucratic and social work photographs that worked to circulate adoptable children within the global market economy of post-war transnational adoption; family photographs of transracially adoptive families; and the photographic practices of contemporary Korean adoptee artists. These bodies of photography suggest that transnational adoption is honed by its photographic practitioners and subjects as, respectively, a site of humanitarian empire-building, a global market economy, a site of non-normative kinship formation, and a site of identity negotiations. In articulating these varied practices and roles of photography, I argue that the medium has not only recorded the practices of transnational adoption from Korea but has played an active role in the production of its conditions, as well as American ideals of race, family, and citizenship.