Isabel Côté

Isabel Côté is a professor in the Department of Social Work at Université du Québec en Outaouais. Her research aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of third-party reproduction by combining the perspectives of all the people involved: parents, gamete donors and surrogates, extended families and individuals conceived through gamete donation or surrogacy. Anchored in innovative qualitative methodologies, her work draws from the sociology of the family, kinship anthropology and feminist and LGBTQ+ studies to take a fresh look at contemporary family experiences that remain marginalized today. The agency of children is fully integrated in the construction of knowledge about families created thanks to third-party reproduction. Her research results are mobilized in community and institutional networks through research partnerships with organizations such as the Centre ESPER and the Quebec LGBT+ Family Coalition. Côté is a member of the Comité central d’éthique clinique en procréation médicalement assistée (Quebec central committee on the clinical ethics of medically assisted reproduction). She contributes to social and policy debates, while also promoting the development of tools to better support the well-being of the people involved in third-party reproduction. She is a member of the Partenariat Familles en mouvance (an interdisciplinary partnership for research on families) and of the Réseau québécois en études féministes (RéQEF) (Quebec network for feminist studies). In 2025, she entered the Cercle d’excellence de l’Université du Québec, and the UNIE-LGBTQ research partnership, which she co-directed, received the Academic Prize at the Emergence Gala.