TITLE: Non-Adoptee Scholars

DESCRIPTION: 

This We the Experts is our 2nd non-adoptee speaker series panel of 2025. It will feature scholars who study adoption and child welfare through a critical lens. The panel will explore how scholars positioned outside the adoptee experience navigate inclusion, adoptee-centered narratives, and their relationship to the adoption community. join us as we listen and learn from these insightful panelists as they share reflections from their research, writing, and academic journeys.

POINTS TO PONDER:

• What are the pros and cons to not having a personal connection to adoption when writing, investigating, researching about the topic?

• What motivates someone who is not directly impacted by adoption to study the field?

• How can non-adoptee scholars contribute to adoption studies in ways that uplift adoptee-centered narratives and advocacy?

• What gaps still exist in research that, if addressed, could further amplify adoptee voices and experiences?

PANELISTS

Gretchen Sisson (she/her)

Gretchen Sisson, PhD is the author of "Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood." She is a research sociologist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, where she studies abortion and adoption in the United States. Her research was cited in the Supreme Court's dissent for Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, and has been covered in the Washington Post, TIME Magazine, The Nation, NPR, New York Magazine, and many other outlets. Gretchen is grateful for the opportunity to be in dialogue with the Adoption Mosaic community, and with adopted people broadly. As a non-adoptee and non-impacted scholar in this space, she always wants her research to feel accountable and accessible to adoptees, and find that these ongoing conversations are the best way to ensure that it is.

Alan Dettlaff (he/him)

Alan Dettlaff is a professor of social work and co-founder of the upEND Movement. Alan began his career as a social worker in the family policing system, where he worked as an investigative caseworker and administrator. Today his work focuses on ending the harm that results from this system. In 2020, he helped to create and launch the upEND movement, a collaborative effort dedicated to abolishing the family policing system and building alternatives that focus on healing and liberation. He is also the co-founder and co-facilitator of Toward Liberation, an abolitionist reading and study group. Alan wanted to be a part of this panel to build solidarity between those working to end the family policing system and those working to end adoptions.

Zabrina Aleguire (she/her)

Zabrina Aleguire is a seasoned attorney for families who have been separated by child protective services (CPS). She was raised by CPS social workers and channels lessons from her family into her advocacy to transform and ultimately abolish the current system. Zabrina manages the appointed attorney program at the Bar Association of San Francisco for system-involved families and previously represented parents and foster youth across New York City. Zabrina is co-author of “Doing Right by Families: Presenting Dynamic Performance Metrics for Legal Excellence in Child Welfare Law” just published in the Juvenile and Family Court Journal. She is godmother to 10 children and is their parents’ biggest fan.

Angela Olivia Burton, Esq. (she/her)

Angela Burton was "taken in" by her maternal grandparents and raised along with her seven maternal aunts in the villages of Meridian, Mississippi and Brooklyn, New York in what might now be called an informal adoption or "kinship care", a common practice in Black American culture. She is a community lawyer and family policing system abolitionist who uses her voice and platform to expose how the so-called “child welfare” system harms children and families through family separation and oppressive, carceral practices. She advocates for government policies and community approaches that increase access to direct support and material benefits, eliminate the power and harm of the family policing system, support family integrity and autonomy, and promote healing and reparations for impacted children, families and communities. Angela is excited to learn from and share with the Adoption Mosaic community!

Alternate Panelist, Claire Galofaro (she/her)

Claire Galofaro has been documenting America’s fraying social safety net since joining The Associated Press in 2015. Galofaro, a national writer based in Louisville, Kentucky, was awarded the Livingston Award for Young Journalists for her reporting on Appalachia after the collapse of the coal industry. Her stories have explored the spiraling opioid crisis, the repercussions of poverty and government dependency and how despair in small-town America gave way to the rise of President Donald Trump.

She led a global team of reporters who exposed how the international arm of Purdue Pharma promotes opioids overseas, using many of the same tactics widely blamed for sparking the U.S. epidemic, and investigated how the U.S. government failed to prevent a Marine from taking home an Afghan war orphan, in defiance of international treaties and the laws of war. She was also part of a team that exposed systemic fraud and abuse in the South Korean adoption system, a reporting effort that was chronicled in a feature-length FRONTLINE documentary.

Before joining The Associated Press, she worked for several newspapers across the American South, from New Orleans to the Virginia foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. She received a master’s degree in journalism from Syracuse University.