Polina Vlasenko to Deliver Lecture as Part of the Class of 1963 Scholars in Residence Program Vlasenko’s talk, titled “Who else will save this world?: Fertility Markets and the Global Flows of Ukrainian Donor Eggs,” will be held Oct. 14 in Northen Auditorium.

By Brian Laubscher
October 8, 2026

Polina Vlasenko, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellow at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, will present a lecture at Washington and Lee University at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 14, in Northen Auditorium, Leyburn Library.

Vlasenko’s talk, titled “Who else will save this world?: Fertility Markets and the Global Flows of Ukrainian Donor Eggs,” is free and open to the public. She is visiting W&L as part of the Class of 1963 Scholars in Residence Program, supported by the Provost’s Office, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Eastern European and Russian Studies Department. While on campus, Vlasenko will have dinner with students and visit two classes, SOAN 2905-02: Ethnographies of Crime and Social Control and SOAN 2353-10: The Russo-Ukrainian War, taught by Ivan Shmatko, assistant professor of sociology.

“Polina Vlasenko’s research asks who does the work, and who benefits, when human reproduction becomes a global market,” Shmatko said. “Her study of Ukraine’s egg donation market explores how biotechnology is shaped by powerful social forces such as economics, race and gender. Having her on campus gives our students and the larger W&L community a valuable opportunity to learn from a scholar who is examining the social implications of emerging biotechnologies for women’s lives and labor.”

Vlasenko’s lecture will focus on Ukraine’s role as a major source of donor oocytes, or human eggs, for fertility markets in Europe, Israel and North America. Infertility and limited access to donor eggs abroad have fueled a market in which Ukrainian women are legally compensated for donating their eggs. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Ukraine’s fertility industry since 2015, Vlasenko will trace how oocytes move from Ukrainian clinics to patients abroad and ask what makes these eggs so valued in international markets. The talk will also examine how the war in Ukraine has changed these routes, pushing clinics and egg banks to find new ways to store and transport gametes across borders.

Vlasenko is a cultural and medical anthropologist trained in political philosophy, gender studies and science and technology studies. Her research addresses reproductive intimacies and labor, political economy, assisted reproductive technologies, biocapitalism and the postsocialist transformation of gender, health and biotechnology, drawing on fieldwork in Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in political science from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine), a Master of Science in social studies of gender from Lund University (Sweden), a Master of Science in gender studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in medical anthropology from Indiana University Bloomington.