K E Cheney
Biographic Data
| ID | 14845 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K E Cheney |
| GIVEN NAMES | K E |
| FAMILY NAME | Cheney |
| SIGNATURE | CHENEY K E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4216-7410 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 108 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
If We Do Not Speak Out, No One Else Will’
This article highlights the role of adoptee activism in raising awareness and changing policy regarding Intercountry Adoption (ICA) in The Netherlands. Through interviews with a selection of adoptees engaged in activism, this study shows that (i) adoptees became engaged in activism as a result of growing adoptee consciousness in combination with encountering irreconciliation; (ii) they employed many types of activism, sometimes with different goa…
So Goes China
Social Work in a Post- Dobbs World
This article takes as its departure a critique of the ‘adoption fallacy’ underlying the US Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization to argue that the Dobbs decision incentivizes a reconsideration of social work practice as a site for advancing reproductive justice. To do this, however, social work must strive to decolonize the profession by critically reflecting on its role in reproductive policy and politics, particula…
Eyes on the Prize
Phillips and Cheney preface an analysis of the ASA's Graduate Student Paper Prize in a discussion with past Prize winners with a review of the sociological literature on awards and scholarly critiques of the history of African Studies. They find that the Prize has played an important role in amplifying and recognizing the voices of young scholars who have pushed the thematic and theoretical boundaries of the field. But these contributions are att…
Discordant Expectations of Global Intimacy
Gestational surrogacy - carrying someone else's baby (or babies) to term and giving birth to them - is perhaps one of the most intimate acts a human being can perform for others. However, the proliferation of commercial surrogacy has drawn concern and criticism, with many scholars arguing that it both creates and exacerbates global social and economic inequalities. Commercial surrogacy thus raises both the possibility of global intimate connectio…
Closing New Loopholes
Despite closing a legal guardianship loophole that enabled foreign prospective adoptive parents to bypass restrictive Ugandan adoption laws in 2016, corruption in intercountry adoption persisted, with the courts legitimating new end-runs around the requirements. But US sanctions issued in 2020 bring new hope for reform. By highlighting what children's advocates are doing to fight back, I suggest strategies for effective child and family safeguard…
Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention
Baby Markets and Global Inequalities
Orphanhood and the Transformation of Kinship, Fosterage, and Children’s Circulation Strategies
This chapter examines the way AIDS orphanhood has influenced child circulation and kin construction in Uganda. While many studies have documented the effects of AIDS on orphans and vulnerable children’s circulation in Africa, few studies have critically examined the effects of AIDS on constructions of kinship, and particularly its symbolic repertoire amidst its everyday significance as a bodily substance. While ‘blood’ in the African context has …
Children’s Rights
This chapter argues that, due to the ways aid organizations and government policies have targeted orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), rights-based approaches have thus far failed to achieve widespread empowerment of children—nor have they adequately addressed the structural causes of the problems of orphans. Instead, the Convention on the Rights of the Child’s (CRC’s) ‘best interest principle’ hinders the actionability of children’s rights for…
A Generation of HIV/Aids in Uganda
This chapter introduces the concept of ‘the post-ARV generation’ through a contextual analysis of the history of the HIV-AIDS pandemic in Africa – Uganda specifically – and how that shaped the childhood experiences of those born around the time that prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) and antiretroviral treatment (ART) became available. The chapter also provides an account of the humanitarian and development aid responses to AIDS o…
Getting Children’s Perspectives
This chapter details the methodology of the study and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of participatory research with young people. It argues that participatory ethnographic research with children is particularly appropriate to the task not only of capturing the lived experiences of children as a distinct social group but also of increasing both children’s participation and children’s citizenship—especially when ethnographic research mo…
Orphanhood, Poverty, and the Post-ARV Generation
This chapter brings attention to the daily struggles faced by young people in contemporary Uganda, where indeed all children are affected in some way by HIV/AIDS but also by persistent structural, household-level, and/or individual poverty. While HIV/AIDS has certainly shaped the lives of the young people who became youth research assistant for this study, their life stories also demonstrate that it is primarily poverty that continues to mark the…
HIV/Aids Policy, “Orphan Addiction,” and the Next Generation
Despite the evolution of policy responses to AIDS orphanhood, it continues to be constructed in ways that misidentify or even obscure the true causes of orphan suffering—often with adverse, long-term consequences. This chapter chronicles recent developments that continue to challenge the lives and livelihoods of the post-ARV generation, including increases in the HIV prevalence rate—especially amongst young people—and failures in AIDS education. …
Crying for Our Elders
Orphanhood and the Conundrum of Humanitarian Intervention
This chapter details the evolution of the global and national response to AIDS orphanhood and its unintended consequences. Drawing on critical humanitarian studies in order to examine the effects of OVC targeting, this chapter details the development of the definition of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), as well as its cultural translations. It argues that OVC targeting reified vulnerability as an ironically privileged and empowered childhoo…
Suffering, Silence, and Status
This chapter draws on youth participatory ethnographic fieldwork to provide a deeper understanding of the ways that children affected by AIDS actually experience orphanhood. It explores the social context of AIDS as a both a cause of social suffering and a context for the suffering of individual children, primarily due to the continued stigma of HIV/AIDS in Uganda that makes one’s status unspeakable. After a brief discussion of the methodological…
Orphanhood and the Politics of Adoption in Uganda
Feeling ‘Blue’
This study examined young people’s exposure to sexually explicit media (SEM) in Ethiopia and Uganda, where comprehensive sexuality education is often lacking or even non-existent. Through mixed-method, youth-centred participatory research, young people affirmed the ubiquity of pornography – even in communities with little access to the internet. Male and female study participants aged 12–26 said they turned to pornography because they lacked adeq…
Regulating Commercial Global Surrogacy
Preventing exploitation, promoting equity
This article summarises the findings of the International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy that took place in The Hague over 11–13 August 2014. The Forum brought together 80 of the world's pre-eminent scholars, activists and policy-makers on international adoption and surrogacy to consider the most pressing issues in both fields and posit solutions for them. Participants identified concerns about commercialisation and exploitat…
Blood binds
Strong extended-family fostering traditions and beliefs about "blood" as a substance that not only binds kin but also carries pathogens like HIV and certain character traits make formal adoption of unrelated children rare. Even so, there is strong public sentiment against the increasing number of foreigners seeking to adopt Ugandan children in the wake of other African countries closing adoption programs. Institutionalized orphans are thus in a d…
Suffering, silence, and status
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Ugandan children affected by AIDS conducted from 2007 to 2014, this report summarizes findings of a study conducted to better understand the ways children experience orphanhood at the hands of HIV/AIDS. Three crucial, interrelated concepts emerged: suffering, silence, and status. This study explored the social context of AIDS orphanhood as both a cause of social suffering and a context for the suffering of i…
Children and young people in times of conflict and change
The Arab Spring was not only about citizens toppling the regime in Tunisia, occupying Tahrir Square in Egypt and the streets of Yemen and Bahrain, and militant confrontations in Libya. It was about a generation that had dreams and that is now facing challenges to live in dignity. Not only young people, but children too were part of the uprisings, whether joining their parents or joining the dissent against their parents’ wishes. Others who had no…
A facade of democracy
Many orphans in Jordan, according to Islamic Family Law, lack the lawful lineage that forms the basis of rights such as the right to a family name or inheritance. In a society that is characterized by a tribal sense of belonging and patrilineal entitlement, these legal disadvantages, added to the hardships of orphanhood, manifest themselves in orphans’ everyday lives, resulting in social stigma and discrimination. Orphans and youth without lawful…
Locating Neocolonialism, "Tradition," and Human Rights in Uganda's "Gay Death Penalty
In 2009, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill introduced in Uganda's Parliament reignited homophobic sentiment across Africa. Despite a well-documented history of sexual diversity in Africa, claims that homosexuality is "un-African" are being used to justify violence and exclusion. This article, based primarily on a discursive analysis of public media sources, delves into various cultural logics that reveal the tensions and contradictions in Ugandans' wid…
Giving Children a Better Life?’ Reconsidering Social Reproduction, Humanitarianism and Development in Intercountry Adoption
Our Children Have Only Known War’
This article describes the situation of children forcibly abducted by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. The involvement of children complicates efforts to end rebellion, and particular notions of childhood circulate through government and aid agencies to affect children's ‘rehabilitation’. This paper examines national, ethnic, and generational causes of the conflict, discussing the ways in which normative and ideal concepts of …
Children as ethnographers
Critiques of child participation within aid programming suggest that it is superficial and insubstantive for the fulfilment of children's rights. By employing former child research participants as youth research assistants, the collaborative research design developed for my research project on the survival strategies of African orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) has yielded insights with implications for policy and practice that could not be g…
Killing them softly? Using children’s rights to empower Africa’s orphans and vulnerable children
This article considers ways to shift the implementation of children’s rights-based aid approaches from protectionism, which hinders orphans and vulnerable children’s (OVCs) survival strategies, to empowerment in order to transform OVC livelihoods. I emphasize children’s citizenship as a means of increasing OVC participation in policy-making
Regulating Commercial Global Surrogacy
Blood binds
Strong extended-family fostering traditions and beliefs about "blood" as a substance that not only binds kin but also carries pathogens like HIV and certain character traits make formal adoption of unrelated children rare. Even so, there is strong public sentiment against the increasing number of foreigners seeking to adopt Ugandan children in the wake of other African countries closing adoption programs. Institutionalized orphans are thus in a d…
Village Life Is Better Than Town Life
This article contextualizes Ugandan urban-rural relations through urban children's knowledge, imaginations, and experiences, which are affected by the present sociohistoric moment in Uganda. Influenced by urban-rural migration, changing notions of family and kinship, and the national government's prolific "development-through-education" campaign, urban schoolchildren imagine "the village" both as an integral imaginary space of ethnic identity ori…
A facade of democracy
Many orphans in Jordan, according to Islamic Family Law, lack the lawful lineage that forms the basis of rights such as the right to a family name or inheritance. In a society that is characterized by a tribal sense of belonging and patrilineal entitlement, these legal disadvantages, added to the hardships of orphanhood, manifest themselves in orphans’ everyday lives, resulting in social stigma and discrimination. Orphans and youth without lawful…
Social Work in a Post- Dobbs World
This article takes as its departure a critique of the ‘adoption fallacy’ underlying the US Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization to argue that the Dobbs decision incentivizes a reconsideration of social work practice as a site for advancing reproductive justice. To do this, however, social work must strive to decolonize the profession by critically reflecting on its role in reproductive policy and politics, particula…
Preventing exploitation, promoting equity
This article summarises the findings of the International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy that took place in The Hague over 11–13 August 2014. The Forum brought together 80 of the world's pre-eminent scholars, activists and policy-makers on international adoption and surrogacy to consider the most pressing issues in both fields and posit solutions for them. Participants identified concerns about commercialisation and exploitat…
Discordant Expectations of Global Intimacy
Gestational surrogacy - carrying someone else's baby (or babies) to term and giving birth to them - is perhaps one of the most intimate acts a human being can perform for others. However, the proliferation of commercial surrogacy has drawn concern and criticism, with many scholars arguing that it both creates and exacerbates global social and economic inequalities. Commercial surrogacy thus raises both the possibility of global intimate connectio…
Closing New Loopholes
Despite closing a legal guardianship loophole that enabled foreign prospective adoptive parents to bypass restrictive Ugandan adoption laws in 2016, corruption in intercountry adoption persisted, with the courts legitimating new end-runs around the requirements. But US sanctions issued in 2020 bring new hope for reform. By highlighting what children's advocates are doing to fight back, I suggest strategies for effective child and family safeguard…
Baby Markets and Global Inequalities
Youth and the City in the Global South. Tracking Globalization
In recent years, the percentage of the world's population living in cities has tipped from less than to more than half. That number is only expected to climb, and developing countries are likely to
A Debate beyond Sexuality
Did the constitution produce my children!?’ Negotiating Ugandan childhood and nationhood through performance
Did the constitution produce my children!?’ Negotiating Ugandan childhood and nationhood through performance
Village Life Is Better Than Town Life
This article contextualizes Ugandan urban-rural relations through urban children's knowledge, imaginations, and experiences, which are affected by the present sociohistoric moment in Uganda. Influenced by urban-rural migration, changing notions of family and kinship, and the national government's prolific "development-through-education" campaign, urban schoolchildren imagine "the village" both as an integral imaginary space of ethnic identity ori…
Our Children Have Only Known War’
This article describes the situation of children forcibly abducted by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. The involvement of children complicates efforts to end rebellion, and particular notions of childhood circulate through government and aid agencies to affect children's ‘rehabilitation’. This paper examines national, ethnic, and generational causes of the conflict, discussing the ways in which normative and ideal concepts of …
Pillars of the Nation
Living with Bad Surroundings
A Debate beyond Sexuality
Children as ethnographers
Critiques of child participation within aid programming suggest that it is superficial and insubstantive for the fulfilment of children's rights. By employing former child research participants as youth research assistants, the collaborative research design developed for my research project on the survival strategies of African orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) has yielded insights with implications for policy and practice that could not be g…
Reconceptualizing Children's Rights in International Development
Building on recent human rights scholarship, childhood studies and child rights programming, this conceptual framework on children's rights proposes three key-notions: living rights, or the lived experiences in which rights take shape; social justice, or the shared normative beliefs that make rights appear legitimate for those who struggle to get them recognised; and translations, or the complex flux between different beliefs and perspectives on …
Killing them softly? Using children’s rights to empower Africa’s orphans and vulnerable children
This article considers ways to shift the implementation of children’s rights-based aid approaches from protectionism, which hinders orphans and vulnerable children’s (OVCs) survival strategies, to empowerment in order to transform OVC livelihoods. I emphasize children’s citizenship as a means of increasing OVC participation in policy-making
Locating Neocolonialism, "Tradition," and Human Rights in Uganda's "Gay Death Penalty
In 2009, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill introduced in Uganda's Parliament reignited homophobic sentiment across Africa. Despite a well-documented history of sexual diversity in Africa, claims that homosexuality is "un-African" are being used to justify violence and exclusion. This article, based primarily on a discursive analysis of public media sources, delves into various cultural logics that reveal the tensions and contradictions in Ugandans' wid…
Youth and the City in the Global South. Tracking Globalization
In recent years, the percentage of the world's population living in cities has tipped from less than to more than half. That number is only expected to climb, and developing countries are likely to
Giving Children a Better Life?’ Reconsidering Social Reproduction, Humanitarianism and Development in Intercountry Adoption
Suffering, silence, and status
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Ugandan children affected by AIDS conducted from 2007 to 2014, this report summarizes findings of a study conducted to better understand the ways children experience orphanhood at the hands of HIV/AIDS. Three crucial, interrelated concepts emerged: suffering, silence, and status. This study explored the social context of AIDS orphanhood as both a cause of social suffering and a context for the suffering of i…
Children and young people in times of conflict and change
The Arab Spring was not only about citizens toppling the regime in Tunisia, occupying Tahrir Square in Egypt and the streets of Yemen and Bahrain, and militant confrontations in Libya. It was about a generation that had dreams and that is now facing challenges to live in dignity. Not only young people, but children too were part of the uprisings, whether joining their parents or joining the dissent against their parents’ wishes. Others who had no…
A facade of democracy
Many orphans in Jordan, according to Islamic Family Law, lack the lawful lineage that forms the basis of rights such as the right to a family name or inheritance. In a society that is characterized by a tribal sense of belonging and patrilineal entitlement, these legal disadvantages, added to the hardships of orphanhood, manifest themselves in orphans’ everyday lives, resulting in social stigma and discrimination. Orphans and youth without lawful…
Invisible Children fades away
The global reach of Invisible Children's viral video KONY 2012 supposedly established the efficacy of 'spectacular humanitarianism': sympathetic spectatorship of suffering others through the mediatization, commodification, and depoliticization of Western humanitarian action. However, their 'brand' of activism ultimately proved unsustainable, as Invisible Children announced in late 2014 that it was phasing out operations. Here I consider how Invis…
Preventing exploitation, promoting equity
This article summarises the findings of the International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy that took place in The Hague over 11–13 August 2014. The Forum brought together 80 of the world's pre-eminent scholars, activists and policy-makers on international adoption and surrogacy to consider the most pressing issues in both fields and posit solutions for them. Participants identified concerns about commercialisation and exploitat…
Blood binds
Strong extended-family fostering traditions and beliefs about "blood" as a substance that not only binds kin but also carries pathogens like HIV and certain character traits make formal adoption of unrelated children rare. Even so, there is strong public sentiment against the increasing number of foreigners seeking to adopt Ugandan children in the wake of other African countries closing adoption programs. Institutionalized orphans are thus in a d…
Orphanhood and the Transformation of Kinship, Fosterage, and Children’s Circulation Strategies
This chapter examines the way AIDS orphanhood has influenced child circulation and kin construction in Uganda. While many studies have documented the effects of AIDS on orphans and vulnerable children’s circulation in Africa, few studies have critically examined the effects of AIDS on constructions of kinship, and particularly its symbolic repertoire amidst its everyday significance as a bodily substance. While ‘blood’ in the African context has …
Children’s Rights
This chapter argues that, due to the ways aid organizations and government policies have targeted orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), rights-based approaches have thus far failed to achieve widespread empowerment of children—nor have they adequately addressed the structural causes of the problems of orphans. Instead, the Convention on the Rights of the Child’s (CRC’s) ‘best interest principle’ hinders the actionability of children’s rights for…
A Generation of HIV/Aids in Uganda
This chapter introduces the concept of ‘the post-ARV generation’ through a contextual analysis of the history of the HIV-AIDS pandemic in Africa – Uganda specifically – and how that shaped the childhood experiences of those born around the time that prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) and antiretroviral treatment (ART) became available. The chapter also provides an account of the humanitarian and development aid responses to AIDS o…
Getting Children’s Perspectives
This chapter details the methodology of the study and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of participatory research with young people. It argues that participatory ethnographic research with children is particularly appropriate to the task not only of capturing the lived experiences of children as a distinct social group but also of increasing both children’s participation and children’s citizenship—especially when ethnographic research mo…
Orphanhood, Poverty, and the Post-ARV Generation
This chapter brings attention to the daily struggles faced by young people in contemporary Uganda, where indeed all children are affected in some way by HIV/AIDS but also by persistent structural, household-level, and/or individual poverty. While HIV/AIDS has certainly shaped the lives of the young people who became youth research assistant for this study, their life stories also demonstrate that it is primarily poverty that continues to mark the…
HIV/Aids Policy, “Orphan Addiction,” and the Next Generation
Despite the evolution of policy responses to AIDS orphanhood, it continues to be constructed in ways that misidentify or even obscure the true causes of orphan suffering—often with adverse, long-term consequences. This chapter chronicles recent developments that continue to challenge the lives and livelihoods of the post-ARV generation, including increases in the HIV prevalence rate—especially amongst young people—and failures in AIDS education. …
Crying for Our Elders
Political science (31 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Law (25 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (12 works) · Economics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Economic growth (9 works) · Reproductive Health and Technologies (9 works)