RESEARCH

For access to the below articles and other publications visit my Academia.edu page.

Forthcoming book with University of California Press (2024)
The Violence of Love: Race, Adoption, and Family in United States

We are told that adoption is a loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents. This is especially true of transracial and transnational adoptions. The Violence of Love challenges this narrative. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit Myers argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. He comparatively examines the transracial and transnational adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families to understand how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures against others that not. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempted to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet, they were also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality and concludes by offering more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.  

Journal articles

Ma Vang and Kit Myers, “In the Wake of Floyd: Hmong American’s Refusal to be a U.S. Ally,” Amerasia Journal 47.1 (2021) 20-34.

Kit Myers, Amanda Baden, and Alfonso Ferguson, “Going Back ‘Home’: Adoptees Share Their Experiences of Hong Kong Adoptee Gathering,” Adoption Quarterly 23.3 (July 2020): 187-218, DOI: 10.1080/10926755.2020.1790452.

JaeRan Kim, Kit Myers, Kimberly McKee, and Elizabeth Raleigh, “Conceptualizing an Adoption Pedagogy: Expanding Beyond ‘Teaching Adoption,’” Adoption & Culture 7.1 (Spring 2019): 1-5.

“Complicating Birth-Culture Pedagogy at Asian Heritage Camps for Adoptees,” Adoption & Culture 7.1 (Spring 2019): 67-94.

 “Marking the Turn and New Stakes in (Critical) Adoption Studies.” Adoption & Culture 6.1 (Spring 2018): 17-20.

 “‘Real’ Families: Love and Violence in New Media Adoption Discourse.” Critical Discourse Studies 11.2 (Spring 2014): 175-193.

Book chapters

“Creating (Un)equal Families in The Child Citizenship Act of 2000.”In R. Ballard, N. Goodno, R. Cochran, Jr. & J. Milbrandt (Eds.), The Intercountry Adoption Debate: Dialogues Across Disciplines. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, 567-590.

Media