Marcin Smietana

Dr Marcin W. Smietana is a research associate in the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc). Within ReproSoc’s Wellcome Trust funded collaborative grant ‘Changing In/Fertilities’, Marcin coordinates the work package on the changing fertility behaviours and perceptions among LGBTQ+ people. His current research involves qualitative interviews with British gay men who have pursued altruistic surrogacy in the UK or compensated surrogacy overseas.

This follows on from Marcin's previous EU funded study (based at UC Berkeley and Cambridge) on gay men who form families through transnational and domestic surrogacy in the US, as well as from his PhD thesis on Spanish gay fathers through transnational adoption and surrogacy (University of Barcelona, and AFIN-Autonomus University of Barcelona).

With Prof. Charis Thompson (LSE), Marcin co-edited the special issue of Reproductive BioMedicine & Society Online (Nov. 2018);‘Making Families: Transnational Surrogacy, Queer Kinship and Reproductive Justice,’ where the perspectives of queer reproductions are put into conversation with those of stratified reproduction and reproductive justice. Currently, Marcin is writing up a book on gay men’s reproductive decision-making and the thinkability of gay family projects in the context of transnational reproduction.

In his research, Marcin also looked at queer resistance to undemocratic nationalisms, sparked by his early work in Poland and continued in the 2021 CRASSH and lgbtQ+ @cam conference project with Hakan Sandal-Wilson on 'Queering Authoritarianisms: Conflict, Resistance and Coloniality'. Marcin's upcoming projects also turn towards relationships between species in human and nonhuman reproduction, queer ecologies and critical animal studies.

Please see the full research group profile and list of publications for Dr Marcin W. Smietana here.