Announcements & Calls For Papers

We are most pleased to announce two special issues of Illinois Child Welfare. Papers for the special issues may be full-length papers or “From the desk of” (see Guidelines For Authors).  We also welcome book reviews and resource recommendations.

In addition, if you are interested in proposing a topic for a special issue, please let us know. We welcome your creative input and suggestions!

Call for Papers

The first special issue, one of the 2011 issues (Volume 6), will be devoted to improving child welfare practice in the areas of adoption and permanency planning.  We welcome thoughtful papers on any pertinent area, in one of the formats described below.  Topics of special interest include:

• The impact of policies providing for guardianship as a permanency option;
• Practical strategies for improving service quality and reducing corruption in domestic and international adoption;
• Human rights concerns in domestic and international adoption;
• The impact of Hague Convention policies on child well-being, permanency planning, and adoptions;
• Effective practices for reducing adoption disruption;
• Helping adoptees and adoptive families with adoptees special medical needs;
• Research about the impact of variations in open and closed adoptions for outcomes for birth parents, adoptees, and adoptive parents;
• Legal and ethical issues in preparing adoptive parents for adoption of older children and youth;
• Theoretical and practical guidelines for effective counseling of birth parents;
• Practical and theoretical strategies for promoting stability in transracial and/or multicultural guardianships and adoptions;
• Problems and solutions in developing child welfare infrastructure to promote permanency planning in transitional societies;
• The ethics and realities of financial transactions entailed in domestic and international adoptions.

If you have papers on other topics, please feel free to contact the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Katherine Tyson McCrea, at ktyson@luc.edu, call 312-915-7028, or fax, 312-915-7645.

Call For Papers

We are also planning a special issue on child welfare services for children with special needs. Topics of special interest for this issue are:

• Educational interventions for child welfare clients with special needs,
• Trauma-focused services for special needs children and youth,
• Advocacy for special needs children in educational and medical as well as social service settings,
• The outcome of child welfare interventions for clients with special needs,
• Aging-out supports to benefit special needs youths,
• Permanency planning for special needs child welfare clients,
• Guidelines for minimizing adoption disruption for special needs children adopted internationally and domestically,
• Psychosocial and legal services for special needs child welfare clients in conflict with the law,
• Case studies or large-scale medical research with application to parenting and services for special needs child welfare clients, on problems such as fetal alcohol syndrome, autism, drug addicted babies, HIV positive babies, etc. 
• Legal and ethical issues with regard to transparency about potential adoptees’ special needs.