Sonja Van Wichelen
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 579381 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Sonja Van Wichelen |
| NOMBRES | Sonja |
| APELLIDO | Van Wichelen |
| FIRMA | VAN WICHELEN S |
| AFILIACIONES | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1196-7551 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 84 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 32 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2005 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Relational Presence
Introduction to Pursuits of Population
Epistemic preparedness
Preparedness strategies for emergent infectious diseases have focused on microbial surveillance, medical stockpiling and healthcare infrastructure resilience. But what does it mean to be epistemically or cognitively prepared for the next disease outbreak? Taking stock of lessons for data practices and statistical modelling in the wake of COVID-19, we propose a reconceptualising of preparedness in global health, focusing on ecological and sociolog…
Of Bridges, Translations, and Practical Necessities
This essay is part of a Thematic Collection of Science, Technology & Human Values on the work of Adele E. Clarke (1945-2024
After biosovereignty
Increasingly, countries in the Global South-notably South Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia-are introducing material transfer agreements (MTAs) into their domestic laws for the exchange of scientific material. The MTA is a contract securing the legal transfer of tangible research material between organizations such as laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, or universities. Critical commentators argue that these agreements in the Global North have co…
Shit, in Silico
Research Article| November 02 2023 Shit, in Silico: On the Postcolonial Materiality of Bioinformation Sonja van Wichelen Sonja van Wichelen Sonja van Wichelen is professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Sydney in Australia. She is the author of Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology (2019) and Religion Gender and Politics in Indonesia: Disputing the Muslim Body (2010). She was a member of the…
Science and the State
Modern science and the modern state are inextricable and co-emergent.Indeed, the rise of the state form has been accomplished through the ways of knowing and extracting that scientific analysis makes possible -including classification, hierarchization, quantification, and reductionism.States have frequently used the sciences as powerful tools for defining and delimiting the polis, for expanding markets, and for deterring, threatening, and waging …
Law as Anti-Kinship
Law and regulation are often seen as the panacea for the ills of science and markets: regulation minimizes risks by setting out clear rules, calls out abuses when those rules are not obeyed, and disciplines actors, institutions, and states to behave according to collectively agreed upon principles. In this article I challenge this liberal narrative of regulation by looking at how cross-border surrogacy arrangements are currently debated in privat…
The Reproductive Bodies of Postgenomics
In this Introduction, we present a collection of articles under the topic "the reproductive bodies of postgenomics." Through individual and collective research, the articles explore-sociologically, ethnographically, and philosophically-how bioscience in the postgenomic age is changing our understanding of reproductive bodies, and more broadly, how it is challenging existing ideas of heredity, embodiment, kinship, and identity. Feminist and postco…
Identity in Postgenomic Times
As genetic knowledge continues to strengthen notions of identity in Euro-American societies and beyond, epigenetic knowledge is intervening in these legitimation frameworks. I explore these interventions in the realm of assisted reproduction-including adoption, donor conception, and gestational surrogacy. The right to identity is protected legally in many states and receives due attention in public and private international law. Originating from …
Biolegality
As an empirical concept, biolegality emerged at the height of biotechnological advances in Euro-American societies when rapid changes in the life sciences (including molecular biology, immunology, and the neurosciences) and their attendant techniques (including reproductive technologies and gene editing) started to challenge ethical norms, legal decisions, and legal forms. As a theoretical concept, biolegality deepens the Foucauldian notion of bi…
I’m the centre part of a Venn diagram’
Intercountry adoptees face many challenges in developing their identity and achieving a sense of belonging in post-assimilation Australia. This study uses a constructivist approach to analyse narrative interviews with a sample of Taiwanese intercountry adoptees in Australia ranging in age from early to middle adulthood. Social identity theory and postcolonial theory are used to frame thematic findings about the impact of micro, meso and macro inf…
Changing nature of adoption and need for post-adoption services
This study explores issues on post-adoption services in intercountry adoptions based on the perspectives of adoption professionals from Taiwan and Australia. Findings revealed that both birth and adoptive families identify service needs for material and emotional support and connection after the adoption process is finalized. However, the current lack of government funding for post-adoption services result in gaps in service delivery. Adoption ag…
O governo da gestação por substituição na era da biotecnologia
Este artigo examina como o direito interage com as mudanças biotecnológicas, olhando para a maneira em que, em processos de reprodução assistida, justificativas legais se relacionam com o conhecimento biológico e social que está redefinindo "pai" e "mãe". Usando o conceito de "biolegalidade", foco no surgimento de novas formas de parentalidade legal, analisando como a reivindicação por direitos pode ser baseada em verdades tanto genéticas quanto …
Personhood in the Age of Biolegality
Narrating connection in intercountry adoption
Connection and reunion is central to adoption, though complicated by geographical, cultural and linguistic differences in the intercountry adoption space. Drawing from narrative interviews, this study investigated perspectives on connection from the perspectives of adult adopted persons and adoptive parents in Australia, from families of origin in Taiwan and from professionals in both countries. Two primary themes characterising perspectives were…
Legitimating Life
The phenomenon of transnational adoption is changing in the age of globalization and biotechnology. In Legitimating Life , Sonja van Wichelen boldly describes how contemporary justifications of cross-border adoption navigate between child welfare, humanitarianism, family making, capitalism, science, and health. Focusing on contemporary institutional practices of adoption in the United States and the Netherlands, she traces how professionals, bure…
Moving Children through Private International Law
This article examines how the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Adoption Convention) plays a central role in justifying the institution of legal adoption. The Hague Adoption Convention has often been regarded as a response to the challenges that the "global situation" brings to adoption practice. Based on private international law, the agreement contains protocols and norms …
Revisiting the Right to Know
In this article I examine regulatory regimes of mobility through the case of transnational adoption. In particular, I focus on ‘return’ journeys by adoptees and their entanglement the ‘right to know’. Backed up by international law, the right to know in the adoption context includes the right to know one’s biological parents, one’s birth culture, and the right to information (for instance, medical information). At large, the ‘right to know’ signa…
Un-signing Geneva
In the last decade, several states have increasingly tried to ‘un-sign’ to their humanitarian obligations by seeking ways to circumvent European or international law. Through an analysis of a recently passed act in Australia on the management of asylum seekers, this paper examines how the practice of ‘un-signing’ can be seen as a symptomatic instance of reconfiguring asylum in late modernity. We focus on the proliferation of ‘legal pragmatics’ in…
Postgenomics and Biolegitimacy
Much has been said about the globalisation of reproduction and the manner in which reproductive labour, biological material, gametes, and babies are increasingly commodified within the global reproductive economy. In interaction with national policies and law, such economies structure the ways in which reproduction is legitimated, governed, and regulated. This article explores how new research in biology – also known as 'postgenomic research' or …
N etherlands
The concepts of race, ethnicity, and nationalism have a specific history in the Dutch context. As many scholars argue, the concepts carry significant moral weight and are often avoided or conveniently ignored rather than seriously confronted or examined in the public and political sphere. The reasons for this collective avoidance can be located through the prism of three key terms—Dutch tolerance, Dutch liberalism, and Dutch identity—that corresp…
Introduction
For the authors of this introduction, home is not always or only sweet home. For us, it is constructed with contradictions, ruptures and anxieties. Indeed, the world never fails to present us with ‘real’ people with ‘real’ issues of home. After ‘rescuing’ the idea of home from its two assumed arch-enemies ‘mobility’ and ‘urbanization’, we will proceed to formulate our appeal to reconceptualize ‘home’ and explicate why and how to do so. We have ci…
Scales of grievability
This article investigates legal performativities of grievability in contemporary child migration and argues for a scalar approach to analyse and understand the cultural politics underpinning current debates on the 'moving' child. I turn to two court cases in the Dutch context that involve alleged child trafficking in international adoption on the one hand and the threat of deportation in child asylum on the other. These two forms of child migrati…
The geography of transnational adoption
International adoption involves crossing borders; it invokes space and geography as adoptive parents imagine distant countries, as children are moved from one nation to another, and as adoptees and their families return to their countries of origin. The spatiality of belonging and identity – but also of trauma and violence – are central concerns for the people involved and to the operations of their cultural, political, and legal practice. Yet su…
Civilizing migrants
On the brink of multiculturalism’s demise in Europe, ‘culture’ configures prominently in the immigration politics of Europe and its nation-states. New discourses of integration emphasize dominant values and norms and define civic membership through cultural commitment or loyalty. How is Europe doing integration, and what is integration doing to Europe? Taking its cues from the Dutch Integration Exam, this article analyses how ‘culture’ is paradig…
Scales of grievability
This article investigates legal performativities of grievability in contemporary child migration and argues for a scalar approach to analyse and understand the cultural politics underpinning current debates on the 'moving' child. I turn to two court cases in the Dutch context that involve alleged child trafficking in international adoption on the one hand and the threat of deportation in child asylum on the other. These two forms of child migrati…
Medicine as Moral Technology
This article focuses on adoption medicine as a subject of scientific knowledge that increasingly defines the parameters of adoptability in the world of international adoption. While this biomedical discourse alludes to the health of adoptee bodies, it also constitutes ethico-moral practices that produce new justificatory regimes of adoption in particular and humanitarianism in general. Drawing on discourse analysis of scientific texts in adoption…
Please, Go Wake Up!”
Measured to our western standards, [the prophet] Mohammed is a perverse man. A tyrant. He is against the freedom of speech... Mohammed is a role model for all Muslim men. Do you find it strange that so many Muslim men are violent? You are frightened when I say such things, but you make a mistake that most native Dutch make: you forget where I'm coming from. I was a Muslim, I know what I'm talking about. (Ayaan Hirsi Ali cited in Arjan Visser 2003…
Moving Children through Private International Law
This article examines how the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Adoption Convention) plays a central role in justifying the institution of legal adoption. The Hague Adoption Convention has often been regarded as a response to the challenges that the "global situation" brings to adoption practice. Based on private international law, the agreement contains protocols and norms …
Postgenomics and Biolegitimacy
Much has been said about the globalisation of reproduction and the manner in which reproductive labour, biological material, gametes, and babies are increasingly commodified within the global reproductive economy. In interaction with national policies and law, such economies structure the ways in which reproduction is legitimated, governed, and regulated. This article explores how new research in biology – also known as 'postgenomic research' or …
Biolegality
As an empirical concept, biolegality emerged at the height of biotechnological advances in Euro-American societies when rapid changes in the life sciences (including molecular biology, immunology, and the neurosciences) and their attendant techniques (including reproductive technologies and gene editing) started to challenge ethical norms, legal decisions, and legal forms. As a theoretical concept, biolegality deepens the Foucauldian notion of bi…
I’m the centre part of a Venn diagram’
Intercountry adoptees face many challenges in developing their identity and achieving a sense of belonging in post-assimilation Australia. This study uses a constructivist approach to analyse narrative interviews with a sample of Taiwanese intercountry adoptees in Australia ranging in age from early to middle adulthood. Social identity theory and postcolonial theory are used to frame thematic findings about the impact of micro, meso and macro inf…
The geography of transnational adoption
International adoption involves crossing borders; it invokes space and geography as adoptive parents imagine distant countries, as children are moved from one nation to another, and as adoptees and their families return to their countries of origin. The spatiality of belonging and identity – but also of trauma and violence – are central concerns for the people involved and to the operations of their cultural, political, and legal practice. Yet su…
The Reproductive Bodies of Postgenomics
In this Introduction, we present a collection of articles under the topic "the reproductive bodies of postgenomics." Through individual and collective research, the articles explore-sociologically, ethnographically, and philosophically-how bioscience in the postgenomic age is changing our understanding of reproductive bodies, and more broadly, how it is challenging existing ideas of heredity, embodiment, kinship, and identity. Feminist and postco…
Revisiting the Right to Know
In this article I examine regulatory regimes of mobility through the case of transnational adoption. In particular, I focus on ‘return’ journeys by adoptees and their entanglement the ‘right to know’. Backed up by international law, the right to know in the adoption context includes the right to know one’s biological parents, one’s birth culture, and the right to information (for instance, medical information). At large, the ‘right to know’ signa…
Introduction
For the authors of this introduction, home is not always or only sweet home. For us, it is constructed with contradictions, ruptures and anxieties. Indeed, the world never fails to present us with ‘real’ people with ‘real’ issues of home. After ‘rescuing’ the idea of home from its two assumed arch-enemies ‘mobility’ and ‘urbanization’, we will proceed to formulate our appeal to reconceptualize ‘home’ and explicate why and how to do so. We have ci…
Shit, in Silico
Research Article| November 02 2023 Shit, in Silico: On the Postcolonial Materiality of Bioinformation Sonja van Wichelen Sonja van Wichelen Sonja van Wichelen is professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Sydney in Australia. She is the author of Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology (2019) and Religion Gender and Politics in Indonesia: Disputing the Muslim Body (2010). She was a member of the…
Identity in Postgenomic Times
As genetic knowledge continues to strengthen notions of identity in Euro-American societies and beyond, epigenetic knowledge is intervening in these legitimation frameworks. I explore these interventions in the realm of assisted reproduction-including adoption, donor conception, and gestational surrogacy. The right to identity is protected legally in many states and receives due attention in public and private international law. Originating from …
Changing nature of adoption and need for post-adoption services
This study explores issues on post-adoption services in intercountry adoptions based on the perspectives of adoption professionals from Taiwan and Australia. Findings revealed that both birth and adoptive families identify service needs for material and emotional support and connection after the adoption process is finalized. However, the current lack of government funding for post-adoption services result in gaps in service delivery. Adoption ag…
Narrating connection in intercountry adoption
Connection and reunion is central to adoption, though complicated by geographical, cultural and linguistic differences in the intercountry adoption space. Drawing from narrative interviews, this study investigated perspectives on connection from the perspectives of adult adopted persons and adoptive parents in Australia, from families of origin in Taiwan and from professionals in both countries. Two primary themes characterising perspectives were…
Please, Go Wake Up!”
Measured to our western standards, [the prophet] Mohammed is a perverse man. A tyrant. He is against the freedom of speech... Mohammed is a role model for all Muslim men. Do you find it strange that so many Muslim men are violent? You are frightened when I say such things, but you make a mistake that most native Dutch make: you forget where I'm coming from. I was a Muslim, I know what I'm talking about. (Ayaan Hirsi Ali cited in Arjan Visser 2003…
Ein neuer Zivilisationsdiskurs? Der Film Submission, Ayaan Hirsi Ali und der »Krieg gegen den Terror« in den Niederlanden
Article Ein neuer Zivilisationsdiskurs? Der Film Submission, Ayaan Hirsi Ali und der »Krieg gegen den Terror« in den Niederlanden was published on May 1, 2006 in the journal Feministische Studien (volume 24, issue 1)
Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice
An international line-up of scholars examines the role of the intellectual in the twenty-first century, looking at the gap between contemporary cultural theory and cultural practice, and asking whethe
Religion, Politics and Gender in Indonesia
Introduction: Disputing the Muslim Body 1. Muslim Politics and Democratization 2. The Debate on Female Leadership 3. Formations of Public Piety 4. Contesting Masculinity 5. Sexualized Bodies and Morality Talk. Conclusion: Negotiating the Citizen-Subject
Religion, Politics and Gender in Indonesia
The political downfall of the Suharto administration in 1998 marked the end of the "New Order" in Indonesia, a period characterized by 32 years of authoritarian rule. It opened the way for democracy, but also for the proliferation of political Islam, which the New Order had discouraged or banned. Many of the issues raised by Muslim groups concerned matters pertaining to gender and the body. They triggered heated debates about women’s rights, fema…
Blue‐Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love
Civilizing migrants
On the brink of multiculturalism’s demise in Europe, ‘culture’ configures prominently in the immigration politics of Europe and its nation-states. New discourses of integration emphasize dominant values and norms and define civic membership through cultural commitment or loyalty. How is Europe doing integration, and what is integration doing to Europe? Taking its cues from the Dutch Integration Exam, this article analyses how ‘culture’ is paradig…
Indonesian Islam in a New Era
Indonesian Islam in a New Era: How Women Negotiate their Muslim Identities Susan Blackburn, Bianca J. Smith, & Siti Syamsiyatun (Eds) Clayton, Monash University Press, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-1876924546
Medicine as Moral Technology
This article focuses on adoption medicine as a subject of scientific knowledge that increasingly defines the parameters of adoptability in the world of international adoption. While this biomedical discourse alludes to the health of adoptee bodies, it also constitutes ethico-moral practices that produce new justificatory regimes of adoption in particular and humanitarianism in general. Drawing on discourse analysis of scientific texts in adoption…
N etherlands
The concepts of race, ethnicity, and nationalism have a specific history in the Dutch context. As many scholars argue, the concepts carry significant moral weight and are often avoided or conveniently ignored rather than seriously confronted or examined in the public and political sphere. The reasons for this collective avoidance can be located through the prism of three key terms—Dutch tolerance, Dutch liberalism, and Dutch identity—that corresp…
Introduction
For the authors of this introduction, home is not always or only sweet home. For us, it is constructed with contradictions, ruptures and anxieties. Indeed, the world never fails to present us with ‘real’ people with ‘real’ issues of home. After ‘rescuing’ the idea of home from its two assumed arch-enemies ‘mobility’ and ‘urbanization’, we will proceed to formulate our appeal to reconceptualize ‘home’ and explicate why and how to do so. We have ci…
Scales of grievability
This article investigates legal performativities of grievability in contemporary child migration and argues for a scalar approach to analyse and understand the cultural politics underpinning current debates on the 'moving' child. I turn to two court cases in the Dutch context that involve alleged child trafficking in international adoption on the one hand and the threat of deportation in child asylum on the other. These two forms of child migrati…
The geography of transnational adoption
International adoption involves crossing borders; it invokes space and geography as adoptive parents imagine distant countries, as children are moved from one nation to another, and as adoptees and their families return to their countries of origin. The spatiality of belonging and identity – but also of trauma and violence – are central concerns for the people involved and to the operations of their cultural, political, and legal practice. Yet su…
Postgenomics and Biolegitimacy
Much has been said about the globalisation of reproduction and the manner in which reproductive labour, biological material, gametes, and babies are increasingly commodified within the global reproductive economy. In interaction with national policies and law, such economies structure the ways in which reproduction is legitimated, governed, and regulated. This article explores how new research in biology – also known as 'postgenomic research' or …
Un-signing Geneva
In the last decade, several states have increasingly tried to ‘un-sign’ to their humanitarian obligations by seeking ways to circumvent European or international law. Through an analysis of a recently passed act in Australia on the management of asylum seekers, this paper examines how the practice of ‘un-signing’ can be seen as a symptomatic instance of reconfiguring asylum in late modernity. We focus on the proliferation of ‘legal pragmatics’ in…
Legitimating Life
The phenomenon of transnational adoption is changing in the age of globalization and biotechnology. In Legitimating Life , Sonja van Wichelen boldly describes how contemporary justifications of cross-border adoption navigate between child welfare, humanitarianism, family making, capitalism, science, and health. Focusing on contemporary institutional practices of adoption in the United States and the Netherlands, she traces how professionals, bure…
Moving Children through Private International Law
This article examines how the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Adoption Convention) plays a central role in justifying the institution of legal adoption. The Hague Adoption Convention has often been regarded as a response to the challenges that the "global situation" brings to adoption practice. Based on private international law, the agreement contains protocols and norms …
Revisiting the Right to Know
In this article I examine regulatory regimes of mobility through the case of transnational adoption. In particular, I focus on ‘return’ journeys by adoptees and their entanglement the ‘right to know’. Backed up by international law, the right to know in the adoption context includes the right to know one’s biological parents, one’s birth culture, and the right to information (for instance, medical information). At large, the ‘right to know’ signa…
Personhood in the Age of Biolegality
Narrating connection in intercountry adoption
Connection and reunion is central to adoption, though complicated by geographical, cultural and linguistic differences in the intercountry adoption space. Drawing from narrative interviews, this study investigated perspectives on connection from the perspectives of adult adopted persons and adoptive parents in Australia, from families of origin in Taiwan and from professionals in both countries. Two primary themes characterising perspectives were…
I’m the centre part of a Venn diagram’
Intercountry adoptees face many challenges in developing their identity and achieving a sense of belonging in post-assimilation Australia. This study uses a constructivist approach to analyse narrative interviews with a sample of Taiwanese intercountry adoptees in Australia ranging in age from early to middle adulthood. Social identity theory and postcolonial theory are used to frame thematic findings about the impact of micro, meso and macro inf…
Changing nature of adoption and need for post-adoption services
This study explores issues on post-adoption services in intercountry adoptions based on the perspectives of adoption professionals from Taiwan and Australia. Findings revealed that both birth and adoptive families identify service needs for material and emotional support and connection after the adoption process is finalized. However, the current lack of government funding for post-adoption services result in gaps in service delivery. Adoption ag…
O governo da gestação por substituição na era da biotecnologia
Este artigo examina como o direito interage com as mudanças biotecnológicas, olhando para a maneira em que, em processos de reprodução assistida, justificativas legais se relacionam com o conhecimento biológico e social que está redefinindo "pai" e "mãe". Usando o conceito de "biolegalidade", foco no surgimento de novas formas de parentalidade legal, analisando como a reivindicação por direitos pode ser baseada em verdades tanto genéticas quanto …
Law as Anti-Kinship
Law and regulation are often seen as the panacea for the ills of science and markets: regulation minimizes risks by setting out clear rules, calls out abuses when those rules are not obeyed, and disciplines actors, institutions, and states to behave according to collectively agreed upon principles. In this article I challenge this liberal narrative of regulation by looking at how cross-border surrogacy arrangements are currently debated in privat…
The Reproductive Bodies of Postgenomics
In this Introduction, we present a collection of articles under the topic "the reproductive bodies of postgenomics." Through individual and collective research, the articles explore-sociologically, ethnographically, and philosophically-how bioscience in the postgenomic age is changing our understanding of reproductive bodies, and more broadly, how it is challenging existing ideas of heredity, embodiment, kinship, and identity. Feminist and postco…
Political science (27 obras) · Sociology (25 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Politics (13 obras) · Gender Studies (11 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Child Welfare and Adoption (8 obras) · Epistemology (8 obras) · Reproductive Health and Technologies (8 obras)