The Gender and Adult Education Network of ESREA (European Society for Research on the Education of Adults) organised a conference on democracy, inclusion and citizenship, held on 14-16 October 2026 in Huelva, Spain. Our Czech team member, Zdeněk Sloboda, attended the conference and presented initial data from our observations of information and educational events on queer parenting.
In his presentation, he discussed a Polish event held in Warsaw this year in collaboration with a surrogacy agency from the USA. Turning to Czechia, he described the annual “prep courses” for prospective queer parents, organised by an LGBTQ+ NGO for the past 15 years. Finally, he linked informal education on becoming and being a queer parent to Ken Plummer’s concept of intimate citizenship.
Huelva, a town on the Atlantic coast of Andalusia, is associated with Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón in Spanish), who set out from a nearby port on the voyage that began the colonisation of the Americas. This carries symbolic significance for our project in two ways. Firstly, typical cases of surrogacy or adoption by gay couples in the countries we study are connected with the USA. Secondly, our project addresses the American/Western colonisation of academic discourse on queer families in the context of the post-socialist, post-transformation experience of Central European countries.
The conference themes of democracy, inclusion and citizenship were present not only in the lecture halls. On the University of Huelva campus, among the roses of the university garden, stands a monument to the women who died as a result of gender-based violence in Spain in 2020. It is a quiet reminder that questions of gender, intimacy and citizenship are never purely academic.