Chiara Candaele won the SHCY Dissertation Prize for her PhD thesis, Exceptional Childhood: Legitimising Transnational Adoption in Postcolonial Belgium, completed at the University of Antwerp in 2023. We interviewed Chiara to learn more about her research findings, and the process of working on this ambitious PhD.
Congratulations on winning the prize, and on such a compelling thesis. What were your initial research questions? How did they change through the process of researching and writing?
At the outset, I wanted to explore how post-war cases of transnational child displacements were organized in Belgium against the backdrop of international evolutions on thinking about childhood. Various historians had published about inter-European child transfers in the 1920s and 1930s, but not the postwar and postcolonial decades. This led to my growing interest in transnational adoption as a form of child displacement, since it involves moving children between families and across borders. When I began my PhD, most of the literature focused on North America. Virtually no historical studies on Belgian adoption existed, except for a few personal accounts from adoptive parents and adoptees. This made the research feel particularly meaningful, and I chose to dedicate my PhD to studying the development of transnational adoption networks and practices. I later realized that my central question was about how adoption and cross-border child transfers were historically justified, leading me to focus on the legitimation of adoption.
I appreciated the way you explained your challenges in accessing sources (which related to the privatisation of adoption in Belgium and the live issues of privacy and secrecy around birth parenthood). How did you respond positively to this difficulty?
Thank you, it felt crucial to display transparency about access to my sources, especially knowing that many adoptees have struggled—and continue to struggle—to access their own records. The ethical clearance process and negotiations with record holders took over two years. I remember feeling completely overwhelmed on my first day in the office where the records were kept. There were thousands of documents that seemed to offer a wealth of information at first glance, but as I dug deeper, I noticed all the missing details and omissions in the paperwork. This prompted me to think very critically about not only the contents of the documents but also about their role in the adoption process. These papers weren’t created to provide elaborate background information about the child; they existed primarily to legalize the child’s transfer. Adoption records largely document identities that were, in a sense, meant to be undone, which explains the limited interest in preserving those identities. This experience also pushed me to reflect on the power of archives and why certain histories are preserved while others are not.
You interviewed people who had experience transnational adoption. How did that help to develop your arguments?
It made me realize that the popular media binary of “rescue” vs “kidnap” insufficiently captures the complexity of modern adoption practices. The stories of adoptees hold space for experiences of both care and affection, but also of pain and loss. I became a more nuanced writer, not in the sense of shunning controversy, but in actively seeking a way to write about adoption beyond moral dichotomies. If the stories of adoptees and their families can hold and honor these ambiguities, why shouldn’t our histories?
The dissertation title is ‘Exceptional Childhood’. Could you explain what the exceptionality paradigm is, and why you chose this title?
There is an interesting gap between how adoptions from the 1960s—1980s are discussed today and actual discourses from the past. Nowadays, Belgian and Dutch media outlets refer to a “pink cloud” that supposedly blinded parents and mediators to the challenges of adoption. Many believe that criticisms of transnational adoption only started gaining traction in the 1990s, when adult adoptees began sharing their less rosy experiences and more stories of malpractice surfaced. However, I was surprised to learn that even early legislators were acutely aware of the commodifying aspects of adoption. I gradually understood that adoption requires active and continuous justification.
“Practice of exception” is a term coined by Partha Chatterjee to explain the mechanics of imperial interventions. This theory helped me understand how transnational adoption, which goes against the idea that children should be protected from displacement and separation, could be defended under the banner of “exceptional circumstances.” Since the 1950s, policymakers and experts have insisted that transnational adoption should only be considered in exceptional circumstances and always serve the child’s “best interests.”But what exactly constitutes these circumstances and interests has never been clearly defined. These are flexible concepts, shaped by time and place, meaning that the justification for transnational adoption is open to negotiation. In several decolonizing nations, transnational adoption was framed as a way to rescue “abandoned” children of mixed-race parentage from ethnic persecution. Later, as adoption networks shifted from war-torn regions to impoverished but pacified areas, the same narrative of “abandonment” was applied to children from countries seen as unable to manage their so-called “population explosions” without Western intervention.
You gathered a huge amount of research from diverse sources (from law, oral testimony, media, institutional archives, marketing ephemera and so on). In practical terms, how did you organise this material and keep track of it?
Well, I definitely learned this the hard way. More than once, I had to go back to an archive or library because I forgot to note down a page number. I use Trint for interview transcripts and I’m currently experimenting with Obsidian to organize my literature and source notes. I also keep a research logbook to track my activities, though I still love using old-school paper notebooks. In the end, it’s about finding a system that works for you and sticking with it.
How did you refine your argument, e.g. did you present papers at conferences or share drafts with others?
My focus on transnational adoption as a postcolonial practice was thoroughly influenced by the research network Children as Objects and Actors of Change at the University of Amsterdam, which unites scholars interested in the intersections of children and colonialism. They really encouraged me to probe the colonial and missionary roots of adoption and to explore continuities with older forms of child transfers.
Are there particular stories that you found, or case studies, that could not be included in the final thesis, but you would like to share?
At one archive, I was going through a file of a Burundian adoptee and found several letters from his first mother. She had managed to trace the Belgian organisation and contacted them asking her son’s whereabouts, often including pictures of herself and other family members. Some letters had been written more than 15 years after he had been transferred to Belgium. Some envelopes had never been opened, suggesting the agency workers had merely archived them without much consideration. I left them in their unopened state, leaving the contents for the rightful recipient. It is rare that first families are so tangibly present in adoption records. It also made me more carefully consider how my PhD could provide space for their voices and presences.
Your work had immediate impact in Belgium through the current pause in transnational adoption. As a historian, how did you communicate your findings to policy makers in an effective way?
I joined an interdisciplinary expert panel tasked with writing a report that provides recommendations on malpractices in Flemish transnational adoption services (Belgium’s northern, Dutch-speaking region). One common pitfall with these commissions is that the initial assignment is too broad and tends to focus on responsibility. Historians are generally ill-equipped to determine how historical recognition might translate into retributive or restorative measures. They rarely offer the clear-cut answers communities are looking for. So effective communication is essential—both with the affected communities and policymakers. It is important to identify the most pressing issues and understand how historical research contributes relevant insights. Clarity about what historians can and cannot do is key. My part in the report focused on how past decisions are at the root of current problems, while advocating for better record-keeping and greater accessibility to adoption archives.
Can you share something about your current or upcoming projects?
My postdoctoral research is about Protestant institutional childcare in the Dutch East Indies and the Republic of Indonesia. I am part of a team studying how faith-based organizations shaped children’s upbringing in (post)colonial Indonesia. I am excited to dive deeper into the role of religion and the complex dynamics of transnational adoptions and child circulations in a (post)colonial context. The project also includes intensive fieldwork in Indonesia, allowing to gain a deeper understanding of how non-Western caretakers co-opted or resisted adoption practices.
What’s the best book in the history of childhood and youth you’ve read in the past year?
The Lost Children by Tara Zahra was pretty much my bible during the whole research and writing process. It is such a compelling study about the politics of childhood in postwar Europe, and I am in awe of how she managed to bring together sources in so many different languages from across the continent. Somebody’s Children by Laura Briggs and Babies Without Borders from Karen Dubinsky pushed me to think more critically about the politics of transnational adoption. I can’t pick a favourite—they’re all equally brilliant reads!
And in keeping with your current plaudits, what was the first prize you remember winning?
I remember winning a junior tennis tournament at my local club when I was about 11 years old. Which is funny, because I doubt that the people who knew me back then would have labelled me as a sporty child. I was definitely “that nerdy kid” who was always picked last in gym class. I also remember winning an iPod, now an artefact from mid-2000s teenage culture, from a random internet writing competition. It took me a lot of effort to convince my parents that it was not a scam, and they were just as surprised as I was when it arrived in the mail.
Chiara Candaele is a postdoctoral researcher at NL-Lab (Huygens Institute). She specializes in the recent history of children and youth. Her PhD thesis (University of Antwerp, 2023) deals with the history of transnational adoption in Belgium. Between 2020 and 2023, she was a scientific collaborator of the project Resolution-Métis (State Archives of Belgium). She is currently affiliated with the NWO-funded project ‘Child Separation’ and is conducting research on institutional youthcare in the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia.
