A unique morning with three Korean adopted men presenting after each other at an academic conference

This morning the on-going conference Avoiding Origin Deprivation and Genetic Identity Losses at Queen’s University in Belfast opened with three presentations by three male Korean adoptees who all have in common that they are researchers. This has most probably never happened before at any academic event in the world given that not many adoptees have a Ph.D. at all and that most of them who are researchers are not doing adoption studies and most adoptees who are researchers are also female adoptees.

The philosopher Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen from Yonsei University, Seoul, and a Korean adoptee from Denmark, presented about “What could have been: Alternative lives and the adoptee predicament” by using decision making theory to be able to understand how adoptees reflect upon and relate to alternative outcomes of their lives had they not been adopted and how many adoptees suffer from the uncertainty of not knowing about their origins as well as L.A. Paul’s concept of a transformative experience. 

Adoption is for Linding Pedersen an epistemically transformative experience and adoptees are subject to a principled uncertainty which may lead to severe psychological pressure, anxiety, stress, anger and frustration.

After Linding Pedersen I presented about “Adoptees of colour and Swedish antiracism: Decolonising Sweden’s master narrative on transnational adoption” and thereafter Ryan Gustafsson from the University of Melbourne took over, who is an adoptee from Australia and like Linding Pedersen also a philosopher specializing on phenomenological theory. 

Gustafsson’s presented about “Ghostliness, haunting, and Korean overseas adoption” focusing on Korean adoptee memoirs and self-narratives by the way of the concept of haunting. Gustafsson argued that ghosts abound in adoption narratives as the adoptee is haunted by who they once were, who they might have been, and who they could have become as well as by the ghosts of their first parents and original families. The adoptee is according to Gustafsson therefore a kind of an afterlife – and the post-adopted world a milieu in which the past is at once irretrievable (the adoptee’s ghostly origins) and not-quite-over, continuing to exert a both permanent and powerful force on the present. 

Gustafsson further argues that the prism of haunting, ghostliness or spectrality is highly productive for understanding the psychic existence of Korean and other adoptees as well as their bodily experience of not really being alive and perhaps of already having died and thus of being a ghost whose fate it is to always being outside of the real world as well as outside of history and outside of discourse itself.