The Polyphonic Politics of the Missing in Transnational Adoption Justice

By

Friday, April 30, 2027 | 6pm to 8pm

25 West 43rd St, 10th Floor, Suite 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan

In-Person: RSVP | Zoom: RSVP

In 2025, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea (TRCK) concluded its two-and-a-half-year investigation into transnational adoptions from South Korea, releasing a final report that confirmed 56 cases of human rights violations out of 367 petitions. These findings underscore the profound significance of archives and transitional justice, as adoptees’ interactions with their adoption records have served as a lightning rod, helping them articulate their grievances as historic violence. Within the TRCK’s report, these records act as forensic evidence supporting claimants’ petitions for damages and harms.

Building on the political, epistemological, and affective landscape of these documents, Prof. Hosu Kim examines the “missingness” of, in, and towards adoption archives. Specifically, it asks what and who has commonly disappeared in record-keeping practices, and how various stakeholders—such as researchers, grassroots activists, and cultural workers—interpret and engage with these gaps. By tracing diverse approaches to this missingness, Prof. Kim aims to envision a provisional and polyphonic politics of redress and repair within the archival ruins.

Project funded by the 2026 CUNY Faculty Research Support Program

Author Bio

Hosu Kim is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, and a doctoral faculty of the Critical Social Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her current project, From the Ground of Missing: Ethics and Politics of Repair and State Violence in Korea examines multiple sites of the disappearance at the sites of the state and imperial violence in South Korea. By employing “missing” as a method, she interrogates epistemological limit of major truth-seeking efforts and explores alternative ethics and politics of repair. She is also author of Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering, published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2016.