Outsiders Within is a volume of essays, fiction, poetry, and art by transracially adopted writers from around the world who tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit. The volume was first published in 2006 and released in a new edition in 2021: a year in which reproduction and adoption politics have been spotlighted anew.

In this episode, three transracial adoptees talk about what society often gets wrong about adoption.

Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in the Chicago area. She is an award-winning poet, writer, and cultural worker, whose books include Unbearable Splendor and What We Hunger For. She lives in Minneapolis.

Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and award-winning author. She was adopted by white parents in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1975. Gibney is a professor of English at Minneapolis College. Her forthcoming novel Botched explores themes of transracial adoption through speculative memoir.

JaeRan Kim was born in South Korea and adopted to the United States in 1971. She is associate professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma, in the social work program. She is a contributor to the volume The Complexities of Race (NYU Press), and her blog, Harlow’s Monkey, is one of the longest-running transracial adoption blogs in the US.

What society gets wrong about transracial adoption: Sun Yung Shin, Shannon Gibney, and JaeRan Kim.

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

What society gets wrong about transracial adoption: Sun Yung Shin, Shannon Gibney, and JaeRan Kim.

University of Minnesota Press

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