Negotiating Multicultures, Identities and Intersectionalities

timely in three ways. First, international debates about multiculturalism over the last decade have sharpened thinking about the challenge of living in what Cohen (1988) has termed ‘multicultures’ and the identity issues arising from this. Families, as both microcosms of society and pioneers of new ways of living, are (often implicitly) central to this. Second, ‘transracial’ and ‘trans national’ adoption have been and con tinue to be the focus of longstanding debates in the USA and UK. Over time, these have broadened from a predomin ant focus on whether or not it is damag ing and should be stopped (a perspective that continues to exercise many) to understanding how adoptive families live their lives and how their intimate day-to-day discourses around transracial or transnational adoption often construct contradictory positions around belong ing, identity and sameness. Third, the strong feelings that transracial adoption has recurrently generated over the last 40 years have led to a fresh round of political and legislative attention to adoption in the UK. For these reasons, the call for papers for this special issue was broad based and included attention to current political debates on multicul tural ism as well as ethnic matching, identities and legislative change. The response to our call for papers was substantial enough to merit a double issue that includes articles from Europe and the USA, as well as reflections informed by Maori philosophy from New Zealand. The articles have different objects of study: families, children and adults from a variety of ethnicised groups; policy documents; adoptees and non-adoptees. Together, they constitute a rich mix that we hope will give readers a good understanding of the current issues at play in family placement across racialised and ethnicised groups.