Annual William Form Lecture with SunAh Laybourn

TALK TITLE: Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants

ABSTRACT: This talk explores the structural and cultural factors shaping Korean adoption and the evolution of Korean adoptee activism.

Since the Korean War, international adoption has transferred more than 200,000 Korean children to predominantly Western countries, embedding them in structures of racial, cultural, and social displacement. While early adoptees were often expected to assimilate into white-majority societies, the late 20th century saw the rise of Korean adoptee activism as individuals challenged these expectations, reframing adoption as a human rights issue. This project investigates the political, social, and cultural contexts that facilitated this shift, analyzing how Korean adoptees organized, framed their activism, and formed a collective identity across national borders. The formation of a collective identity among adoptees, grounded in shared experiences of transnational and racial dislocation, is a central focus of this project.

SPEAKER BIO: Dr. SunAh M. Laybourn is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Memphis. She received her PhD from the University of Maryland in 2018. Her areas of interest include race and ethnicity, identity development, and Asian America/ns.

SunAh’s latest book, Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants (New York University Press,  2024) examines immigration, citizenship, and belonging through the case of Korean transnational transracial adoptees. Since the early 1950s, over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted in the United States, primarily by white families. Despite being legally adopted, Korean adoptees routinely experience refusals of belonging, whether by state agents, laws, and regulations, in everyday interactions, or even through media portrayals that render them invisible. In Out of Place, SunAh M Laybourn, herself a Korean adoptee, examines this long-term journey, with a particular focus on the race-making process and the contradictions inherent to the model minority myth.

Currently, SunAh is working two projects that examine the Asian American race-making process: 1.) Asian American in/visibility within sociological research on race and racism; and 2.) Historically Black Colleges and Universities’ enrollment of and approach towards Japanese Americans during the immediate post-internment period.

Her research has been published in Social Problems, Symbolic Interaction, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and Asian Pacific American Law Journal. Her co-authored book entitled, Diversity in Black Greek-Letter Organizations: Breaking the Line, is available through Routledge (2018).