Families We Need Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care's Resistance in Contemporary China

"Families We Need is a brilliant and warmly empathic book. Written with grace and lucidity, it elevates readers' understanding of the need for family, and of how neediness can be a source of strength, and even abundance."- Kathie Carpenter, author of Life in a Cambodian Orphanage
"Raffety's work provides a rare and precious view on foster care and other kinship practices in mountainous Southwest China, showing us their deep entanglements with forces of urbanization and globalization. It reveals how life-transforming care could emerge where the most vulnerable individuals encounter each other, quietly resisting the deeply-seated biases of ableism, classism, and even imperialism. The book exemplifies the most empathic and humanizing type of ethnography."- Zhiying Ma, assistant professor at The University of Chicago