Welcome!

My name is Alexa and I am studying Sociology and Global Health/Health Policy at Harvard. I'm writing my senior honors thesis on ethnic identity formation in children adopted from China. I'll be using this blog to document my progress and share my research leading up to the publishing of my thesis in March, 2012.

Why did I choose this topic?

I have always had an interest in China, and spent the summer after my freshman year volunteering at an orphanage in Luoyang, China. I lived at the orphanage and ran daycare activities for toddlers and taught English to older children. The relationships I formed with these children had a very profound impact on me, and I knew I would want to do research on China to U.S. adoption.

After a series of email exchanges with parents who were waiting to adopt or had already adopted from the orphanage I worked at, I became fascinated with the post-adoption process of forming a new family. I was specifically interested in Chinese adoptees' racial and ethnic identity formation. Because most of these children are adopted into Caucasian families, they grow up not looking like their parents. As a mixed-race individual (I am half-Chinese and half-Caucasian), I share this experience of not really looking a lot like either of my parents. Furthermore, both transracial adoptees and mixed-race individuals often have to cope with a disconnect between how they feel racially/ethnically and how other people perceive and categorize them.

Interested in learning more?

I'll be posting more details about my research and its results, as well as discussions about existing literature related to my topic.

I'll be publicizing new posts on Twitter, so follow me: @AlexaIngStern