The significance of care: how local worlds continuously change through global forces. An interview with Katrien De Graeve

Abstract

This paper presents an interview with Katrien De Graeve, postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University and author of important publications in the field of critical adoption studies. The conversation with De Graeve on transnational adoption and aid for refugee minors allows us to explore how transnational migration is profoundly changing today's local systems of care by raising completely new questions and significant contradictions, particularly as far as caring for children is considered. The interview discusses the possibility to re-imagine care relationships beyond the ideal of exclusivity within the nuclear family and sheds light on cultural, social and political constraints which hamper such possibility. We will see how health care discourse enters this space of change in social coexistence impacting the way in which social actors make choices and negotiate the ethical sense of choices.