The project aims to examine how such families function in their daily lives, including their relationships and support networks, while challenging dominant Anglo-American perspectives.
The ERC announced the results of this year’s Advanced Grant competition on June 17. A total of 281 researchers from across Europe, four of them from Poland, will receive a combined EUR 721 million in funding, with each project receiving up to EUR 2.5 million.
Mizielińska, a sociologist and expert in gender and queer studies, focusing on non-normative family structures, intimacy, and cultural models of kinship, is currently an associate professor at the Institute of Sociology at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw.
She previously led the Families of Choice in Poland project (2013–2016), held a Fulbright fellowship at Princeton University, and has conducted research in Finland and Sweden.
Her work has been widely published in international academic journals.
Queer kinship
Mizielińska’s project, titled Queership: New Perspectives on Queer Kinship: LGBTIQ+ Families with Children in Central and Eastern Europe, will explore the complexity of queer family life across Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Croatia.
It will analyse multigenerational and multidimensional family structures, looking not only at internal family dynamics but also at broader support networks including friends and professionals.
"Central and Eastern Europe has been largely absent from global research on queer kinship and family, creating a serious gap in our understanding," Mizielińska said.
"Most of the theories we use come from Anglo-American contexts and don’t reflect the diversity of family structures in other regions. This project seeks to address that gap."
Queer families, as defined by the project, are those in which at least one parent identifies as non-heterosexual or non-cisgender.
These families may consist of same-sex couples raising children, transgender or non-binary parents, polyamorous arrangements, or co-parenting without romantic involvement.
Children in such families may be born via assisted reproduction, adopted, or come from previous relationships.
Despite the lack of official data, due to factors such as legal invisibility and social stigma, experts estimate that tens of thousands of children in Poland are growing up in LGBTIQ+ households.
Polish censuses do not record sexual orientation or gender identity, and same-sex unions cannot be formally registered, making such families effectively invisible in national statistics.
Earlier research by Mizielińska suggests that over 2 million people in Poland identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, with around half living in intimate partnerships. These so-called "families of choice" are often formed without legal or cultural recognition.
The Queership project is the first transnational, interdisciplinary study of queer kinship in the region.
The research team will use a combination of discourse analysis, long-term ethnography, interviews and quantitative methods to gather data.
They will speak not only with family members, but also with friends, extended relatives, activists and professionals who support them.
"We’ll be listening to the voices of LGBTIQ+ families and the people close to them," said Mizielińska. "By taking in these multiple perspectives, we hope to capture the complexity of their lives."
She added that the study will also examine moments of tension and reconciliation: "It’s not uncommon for LGBTIQ+ individuals to experience rejection from their families of origin, but the birth of a child can sometimes transform those relationships and lead to renewed contact."
Mizielińska hopes the project will offer new insights into how queer families in Central and Eastern Europe navigate daily life, insights that are urgently needed in a region often overlooked by international research.
The project will be hosted at the University of Warsaw’s Faculty of Sociology, with recruitment for the international research team to begin shortly.
(rt/gs)
Source: naukawpolsce.pl