Dr Barbara Sumner

Adoption Educator, Independent Researcher, Author

Dr Barbara Sumner's work examines the architectures of adoption, using New Zealand as a case study. Her PhD thesis, The Illegitimate Other: Adoption and the Manufacture of Identity, and her book On Human Adoption draw on archival research, interviews, more than 700 OIA requests, and personal records to trace how the Adoption Act 1955 and its associated legislation impose a lifelong, discriminatory regime on adopted people.

Barbara argues that adoption is a political act, not a settled, sentimental matter, but a lifelong issue of legal personhood and human rights, that has never been subjected to the scrutiny now applied elsewhere. On Human Adoption is available here: https://www.barbarasumner.nz/on-human-adoption

Barbara lives in provincial New Zealand and writes historical fiction. After submitting her most recent novel, The Gallows Bird, she discovered two of its characters matched the biographies of newly discovered ancestors.