'Writing Population History in a Time of Planetary Crisis' - Workshop

You are warmly invited to a joint Centre for Imperial and Global History & Centre for Medical History event on the 2nd-3rd June, entitled 'Writing Population History in a Time of Planetary Crisis.' The workshop will take place in the Digital Humanities Lab (Queen's Building, Streatham Campus.) Thanks to the Society for the Social History of Medicine, it will be catered! 

We are thrilled to welcome Professor Alison Bashford, Scientia Professor in History and Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population at the University of New South Wales, as our keynote speaker. Alison's talk is entitled ‘Slowing and Growing: Global Fertility Decline and Modern World History,' and will take place on Tuesday 3rd June, 11.20-1.00, in the Digital Humanities Lab.  

We have a host of other stellar speakers also joining us for the workshop, so please do feel free to drop in for any of the sessions. The full programme is attached — please do circulate to other lists/individuals who might be interested. No registration is necessary.

Further Info: 

The present moment is suffused with demographic anxieties. Reaching the milestone of 8 billion people in the global population in 2022 has reinvigorated debate about the impact of a growing global population—particularly, though not exclusively, on planetary ecology; this in turn has renewed calls in some quarters for population control measures. At the same time, policymakers have expressed concern about aging populations and declining national birth rates or, in other locations, about the impact of so-called ‘youth bulges’ on security and labour. Meanwhile, actors on the far right have leant upon racialised narratives of migration and demographic change to mobilize support.

History has a particular place in current demographic debates. For example, Natalia Kanem, the Executive Director of the UN Population Fund, has cautioned against ‘population alarmism,’ warning that historic population control measures have been ‘ineffective and even dangerous.’ This 2-day, hybrid workshop will explore the challenges and possibilities of writing population history at this current historical moment. How might population history-writing engage with contemporary demographic anxieties, and how might the concerns of our present moment shape the development of the scholarly field?