Tanya Bakhru

Tanya BakhruProfessor

Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

 
 

Current Research Activities

Using the Kinship Center Foster Family Agency in San Jose as a resource, I will employ a snowball sampling method to conduct semi-structured qualitative interviews with  LGBT foster parents. I will examine the experiences of LGBT parents of children who have been or are currently in foster care and explore how reproductive justice frameworks carry the potential to reconcile the tensions between the problematic nature of the foster care system and the simultaneous use of that system by LGBT couples to create families. There is a dearth of scholarly work that addresses reproductive justice and foster care specifically. I see my work contributing to Reproductive Justice Theory, LGBT Studies, and Gender Studies discourses. 

Personal Connections to Research

This is a very personal project for me because my spouse and I utilized the foster care system to adopt our son an create our family. It was during the course of our own adoption journey that I started to formulate these research questions.

Keywords

Reproductive justice, transnational feminism, women' health movements, feminist critiques of globalization