Joanna Mizielińska

holds DSs (habilitation) in sociology, University of Warsaw and a PhD in Women’s Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of Polish Academy of Sciences. She was a Fulbright scholar at Princeton University working under the mentoring of prof. Judith Butler, CIMO researcher at the Christina Institute, University of Helsinki, and visiting scholar at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.

She currently works as an Associate Professor at the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her interests concentrate on queer theory, queer kinship, and sociology of gender, sexuality and families. Her past research centred on the politics of translation of Anglo-American queer theoretical approaches/concepts into other geopolitical contexts and the question of exclusion.

She was a Principal Investigator of the project Families of Choice in Poland (2013-2016), which was the first multi-method project on queer families in Poland; and Co-Investigator in Doing Right(s): Innovative tools for professionals working with LGBT families [dir. by prof. F.de Cordova, University of Verona; 2016-2020] and “Queer(y)ing Kinship in the Baltic Region” [dir. by prof. U. Dahl, Södertörn University, 2016-2021].

 She is the author of Different or ordinary? Families of choice in Poland (2017), Sex/Body/Sexuality (2007) and (De)Constructions of Femininity (2004) and co-author of In different voices. Families of Choice in Poland (2017) and Families of choice in Poland. Family life of nonheterosexual persons (2015). She is co-editor of De-Centring Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspective (Ashgate, 2011 and Routledge, 2016). Her most recent writing focuses on critically analysing discourses on families of choice in Poland and queer kinship plasticity (Journal of Homosexuality, 2017, 2020) and researching queer kinship beyond Western queer paradigms (Sexualities, 2017, Gender Place and Culture, 2020). Her book Queer Kinship at the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland, focusing on queer kinship decentring Anglo-American empirical and theoretical framework will be published by Routledge in 2022.