Keywords Dictionary

We use keywords to make categorize and make your work ‘findable’ by visitors to the site. All defintions are broadly defined, fluid, and dynamic.

 

Abstraction
Erasure of the specific, relational lived expereinces and historical realities of people and/or communities by attempting to make a generalized, overarching theory or concept (ex. wilderness)

Adoptee Activism
Activism which demands adoptees are seen, heard, and understood as legitimate, essential voices in the struggle for self-determination

Belonging
Comfort with, and the feeling of, the right to be in a place, community, and/or family

Border(land)
“A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residude of an unnatural boundry. It is in a constant state of transition.”
-Anzaldúa, Gloria. “The Homeland, Aztlán.” Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed., 1987, Aunt Lute Books, pp. 25.

Celebration
A social gathering to rejoice and remember an event that has happened individually, communally, nationally, or globally

Climate Justice
The movement (and term) for just climate futures for all. Climate justice activists recognize that people of color are disproportionately affected by climate change and demand fundamental transformation of policy, practices, and instrastructure at all scales

Climate Refugees
People and/or communties who are forced to migrate because of current of expected future climate changes in the places they know/make/call as home

Coming Out of the Fog
A phrase used to describe the beginning process (in a life-long journey) of reckoning, tracing, and navigating adoption on one’s own terms

Community
A group of people who share something in common, including: lived experience, geographic location, religion, ethnicity, etc.

Diaspora
Broadly, migration and settlement over space and time within social, historical, and political contexts

Environmental Disaster
Catastrophic process and events, often which could have been preventable, surrounding the environment. For example, Hurricane Katrina is an environmental disaster which has environmental, social, political, and economic consequences and resonances beyond the ‘event’ of the hurricane itself.

Environmental Justice
A movement and term, closely related to ‘climate justice,’ which demands environmental protection, recognition, affirmation, and transformation for the ‘right to live, work, and play’ for all humans and more than humans

Environmental Racism
“Any policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuas, groups, or communities based on race or color. It also includes exlusionary and restrictive practices that limit participation by people of color in decision making boards, commissions, and regulatory bodies.”
-Bullard, Robert D. “The Threat of Environmental Racism.” Resources and Environment, vol. 7, no. 3, 1993, pp. 23-26.

Fire
Burning, desire, persistence, combustion, etc.

Flight
To fly

Food
Inseparable from historical, familial, and invidual: memory, kinship, belonging, culture, and place-making

Haunting
“The relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation. Haunting is both acute and general; individuals are haunted, but so are societies…haunting lies percisely in the refusal to stop.”
-Tuck, Eve, and C. Ree. “A Glossary of Haunting.” Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Stacey H. Jones and Tony E. Adams, Left Coast Press, Inc., 2013, pp. 639-658.

Home
A place, space, and/or time where one always feel a sense of belonging. A place to return.

Joy
Happiness and pleasure

Kinship
Close relationship. Often used to describe a familial relationship, but may be social too. Transracial adoptees, as Dr. Kimberly McKee argues, often disrupt White, heteronormative visions of kinship.
-McKee, Kimberly D. Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States. University of Illinois Press, 2019.

Memory
Can be individual, social, national, or international. See ‘haunting.’

Land
Dispossession, soil, earth, grounding, reclamation, growth, etc.

Outsider
Survivance, in the legacy of Ousiders Within.
-Trenka, Jane Jeong, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin, editors. Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption. South End Press, 2006.

Reclamation
Reasserting self, transformation, reclaiming what has been lost

Reproductive Justice
“The human right to maintain bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable environments.”
-SisterSong. “Reproductive Justice,” https://www.sistersong.net/reproductive-justice. Accessed 8 May, 2022.

Uncertain Environmental Futures
The uncertaintiy of life, place, and space within the context of climate change. The possibility of multiple environmental futures which cannot be sepparated from out past and present.

Water
Tears, oceans, rivers, lakes, sweat, glaciers, puddles, etc.