Mothers Make Books: Exploring Mothers' Experiences of Adoption without Consent

This film is part of an interdisciplinary collaboration that seeks to explore how creative methods can help raise more awareness of experiences of adoption without parental consent and prioritise mothers’ voices and perspectives. The voices of mothers whose children have been taken into care and placed for adoption, without parental consent, are still largely missing from the field of adoption studies, and media coverage of such mothers is often unsympathetic and even stigmatising. The film was produced by Dr Stella Bolaki (School of English, University of Kent) and Dr Samantha Davey (Essex Law School). It built on two workshops held in person and online in July 2022 with an intergenerational group of mothers who made artists’ books in response to their experiences of adoption and its long-term effects on their well-being and lives. The project was supported by Research England Participatory Funding 2021-22 (allocated to the University of Kent) and by the Centre for Public and Policy Engagement Fund (University of Essex). A project website is currently being built where the film will be hosted alongside other resources.