Marcin Smietana

Dr Marcin Smietana

Position

Research Associate in ReproSoc

Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at ReproSoc

Department

About

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 ReproSoc research group profile for a full list of Marcin's publications.

Teaching

Within the Department of Sociology, Marcin teaches on Sociology of Gender (Soc 10), Sociology of Health and Illness (Soc 13), Concepts and Arguments in Sociology (Soc 4), as well as the MPhil in Health, Medicine and Society. He has been supervising and co-supervising undergraduate, MPhil and PhD dissertations on LGBTQ+ families and queer kinships, reproductive technologies and reproductive justice, the politics of sexuality and race, and species and veganism.

Welcome to Q+

lgbtQ+@cam is an initiative launched in 2018 to promote interdisciplinary research, outreach and network building related to queer, trans and sexuality studies at the University of Cambridge.