Kutatóprofesszorunk, Szalma Ivett semi-plenary előadást tart az Európai Szociológiai Társaság (European Sociological Association, ESA) idei, augusztus 25-28 között Varsóban megrendezésre kerülő konferenciáján.

Előadásának címe: Szalma Ivett (ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, Hungary and Corvinus University of Budapest): Who Is Allowed to Reproduce? Reproductive Governance in Hungary

A semi-plenary előadók teljes listája a European Sociological Association oldalán

Az előadás kivonata angol nyelven: 

Over the past decade, Hungary has become a particularly illustrative case for understanding how nationalist and illiberal state projects reorganise reproduction as a central site of moral and political struggle. Drawing on five years of coordinated research conducted within the Reproductive Sociology Research Group in Hungary, this presentation examines how reproductive decision-making is shaped by the intersecting regimes of gender, sexuality, and state power.

While our empirical research initially focused on individual and macro-level factors influencing reproductive decisions such as socio-demographic position, economic insecurity, and climate-related concerns, we repeatedly encountered the limits of approaches that treat reproduction as a private or apolitical choice. Across studies on access to assisted reproduction, contraception, adoption by same-sex couples, single-mother-by-choice pathways, and age-differentiated family policy instruments, reproductive decisions emerged as deeply embedded in a system of reproductive governance structured by heteronormative, nationalist, and biologically deterministic state logics.

This governance regime not only explicitly excludes LGBTQ+ people from full reproductive citizenship but also produces cross-cutting and stratified forms of exclusion affecting single individuals, specific age groups, and other marginalised social categories. These exclusions operate not only through formal legal restrictions, but also through policy design, moralised public discourse, and the selective recognition of certain family forms as socially valuable and oriented towards the future.

Based on these empirical findings, the presentation conceptualises reproductive governance as a contradictory and uneven field in which the state simultaneously promotes reproduction as a national imperative while defining whose reproduction is considered legitimate.