Gina E Miranda Samuels, PhD

The child welfare system can be a labyrinth for children, youth and families - a maze built around ideology, glaring gaps in research and practice, and legacies of white supremacy, colonialism, racism, and classism. What passes for "normal" assumptions about family belonging, "healthy" identity, and pathways to well-being into adulthood become open to question. Longstanding policies and practices in adoption and foster care often marginalize the distinct needs of some young people whose adulthoods are launched without benefit of the basic foundations and supports that many other emerging adults enjoy across the life course.

As an applied researcher, Gina E. Miranda Samuels, Associate Professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, uses critical interpretive methods to explore belonging, identity, and kinship among young people with histories of displacement due to adoption, foster care, and home loss.  Her work centers emic (insider) perspectives and has advanced and developed novel conceptual and empirical findings on processes and conditions including relational permanence, survivalist self-reliance, intrafamilial racism, monoracism, ambiguous loss, and the meaning of kinship and home beyond physical, biological, or legal dimensions.  As a black mixed race woman who was transracially adopted, and a former child welfare social worker, Miranda Samuels' scholarly work is distinct and deeply informed by the dual expertise of her professional and personal backgrounds.

Her recent co-authored book Multiracial Cultural Attunement (Jackson & Samuels, 2019) comes at an especially timely moment. Across the U.S., demographic trends continue to reveal that increasing numbers of individuals and families identify and live multiracially and multiculturally. Uprisings calling for racial justice in the U.S. (and world-wide) demand that we confront white supremacy both historic and ongoing. Multiracial coalitions within the Black Lives Matter movement, demand an end to the lethal expression of racism prevalent within U.S. systems both structural and personal, calling us all to be race conscious not race evasive. Yet enduring narratives of racism and the resulting racial reckonings, Miranda Samuels says, remain stuck within monocentric black-white dichotomies of race that distort the full scope of white supremacy, including its harmful relevance to persons of mixed race heritage. Jackson & Samuels’ book offers a counterpoint, advancing a cultural attunement model for practice with multiracial persons and families that disrupts monoracism in our doing and undoing of racial injustice. It stands as the only book within the profession of social work that directly identifies the structures of white supremacy, monoracism, and racial essentialism targeting multiracial families and persons, and is the only practice book which does so using an explicitly anti-racist social justice framework.   

Her earlier study of mixed race adults adopted transracially is based on interviews of 18-35-year-olds. This published work pointedly articulates the harm enacted by current adoption policies that encourage silence or avoidance of explicit discussions with prospective adopters about race and racism. In particular, societal assumptions pervasive among white adopters that black-white mixed race children face less racism and will easily integrate into white families runs counter to her research. Rather, says Miranda Samuels, color- and race-evasive parenting is more damaging than helpful to healthy development of mixed race children who will face a highly racialized existence into adulthood.

In her foster care research, Miranda Samuels continues to examine how the child welfare system can play a constructive rather than harmful role in building supportive family networks, foster relational permanence, and healing ambiguous losses of home. A key challenge for many young people in foster care is developing a family-based sense of identity and belonging when it is buffeted by childhood displacements from biological parents, siblings, peers, foster homes, neighborhoods and schools. In her monograph, "A reason, a season, or a lifetime: Relational permanence among young adults with foster care backgrounds," she identifies enduring emotional support systems marked by mutual love and trust as what's most needed, and most missing, among many young people in foster care. The study, funded by the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, highlights the important role of caseworkers, biological family, and peers and recommends that foster care workers seek to build permanent networks that include biological and foster family members as youth transition to adulthood.

Currently, Miranda Samuels has taken her interests in home loss, identity, and well-being to understanding pathways through physical homelessness among youth and young adults in the U.S.  As Co-PI on the national policy-research initiative Voices of Youth Count, she is lead-researcher of the component “Pathways through Housing Instability.” This national qualitative study is the largest of its kind, and uses critical and narrative life course methods to interview 215 young people about housing instability and the social ecologies that shape their experiences. This study’s findings continue to be disseminated widely to academic, policy, practice, and youth-centered audiences and has formed the basis of congressional testimony for the reauthorization of federal policy guiding services to young people experiencing homelessness. The findings from her national and regional reports have been used to reshape narratives about, and practices with, young people experiencing homelessness across the U.S.

Miranda Samuels' work and its impact extend through many networks. She is considered a leading voice advocating for anti-oppressive practices with youth, young people and adults navigating home loss and disruption via child welfare histories of foster care and adoption. She leads trainings, webinars and is regularly an invited speaker and writer on subjects ranging from transracial adoption, multiracial identity development, healing from ambiguous loss of home, critical and interpretive research methods, anti-racist parenting, and relational approaches to child welfare practice. Samuels is cited as an expert resource by local and national media, and is an advocate and student of anti-oppressive and liberatory social work practice, research and teaching.