Eloïse Richard (University of Geneva)
The workshop Writing Population History in a Time of Planetary Crisis took place at the University of Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab (2-3 June 2025). The event brought together ten speakers across four panels – ranging from early-career researchers to senior scholars – as well as a keynote session. Its hybrid format allowed for broad international participation. The workshop was convened by Dr. Rebecca Williams, whose warmth and thoughtful planning created a welcoming and intellectually stimulating environment. Special thanks to her for organising and to the Society for the Social History of Medicine for funding this event.
The workshop was organised in the face of current demographic anxieties : while the global population surpassing 8 billion in 2022 has renewed debates on overpopulation, political actors have also shared concerns about ageing populations, declining birth rates, and also migration. While this strongly resonates with postwar debates on population, there are also strong differences, the current political landscape being shaped by rising authoritarianism, attacks on reproductive rights, budget cuts in international development aid and contested expertise. In this context, Dr. Rebecca Williams invited us to reflect on how population history might help us understand the present, while remaining alert to how such histories can be instrumentalised to undermine human rights.
Half of the papers presented focused on two politically sensitive contexts regarding population discourses today : India and the United States. With his paper historicising how the “love Jihad” narrative fuels Hindu nationalism, Prof. Mohan Rao highlighted not only the anti-Muslim rhetoric spread in India, but also the difficulties and risks associated with doing critical research on population nowadays. In the US context, Prof. Carole MacCann expressed how the recent defunding policies of USAID and programs in reproductive health, represents not just a methodological but also a political issue. If data has historically often been used for population control measures, it can also be used to support resistance. Without reliable data, it becomes more difficult to critique population policies; as one panelist starkly put it, ‘authoritarianism works best without data’.
Other speakers presented papers on other locations and times : race in nineteenth century Bermuda, Chinese migration in Dutch and British colonies at the turn of the twentieth century, and my own paper on overpopulation and depopulation anxieties in postwar France. All but one paper focused on the modern and contemporary periods. The notable exception was Prof. Catherine Rider’s paper on medieval discourses on fertility. She highlighted – amongst else – the ways in which climate was seen in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as an explanatory variable for the fertility of individuals. Such perspectives stimulated fruitful comparative discussions.
Importantly, the workshop did not limit itself to individual papers. A closing roundtable discussion helped to tie together key debates and offered a space for collective reflection. One main point discussed relates to funding, accessing, and understanding population data. For instance, in her paper, Mileena Saju had emphasised the importance of paying attention to archival silences, to the voices, often of women, that we often have little or no traces left. Another point was the question of scales : how do we study and try to understand the complex and sometimes contradictory dynamics between individual reproductive ‘choices’, local and regional histories and global trends ? Here, I purposefully put ‘choices’ in quotation marks, because the word itself was largely questioned during our discussions. Participants re-emphasised the need to understand the larger political structures and constraints that impact reproductive decisions – that are often far from being a free choice.
Last but not least, Prof. Alison Bashford’s keynote provided much insight for our closing discussions. She highlighted the success of the field of population history in critiquing coercive population control practices. Yet she also asked whether the field is now at a turning point: must we move beyond critique – not to bypass it, but to build on it – in order to confront issues like overpopulation without sidelining it due to this history ? She also invited us to reflect on how we might turn to study histories of declining fertility rates with the same critical attentiveness that has shaped studies of population growth and overpopulation.
Overall, this was a modest event in size, but intellectually rich, with sustained discussion across panels and during social moments including our shared lunches and an evening dinner at a local restaurant. Plans are underway for a special issue publication based on this workshop, and we’re very excited to collaborate and share more widely some of the insights from this event. As a first-year PhD student, I feel most grateful to Dr. Rebecca Williams and to all participants for such fruitful exchanges. Given the political context, these were far from light discussions to have, but Writing Population History in a Time of Planetary Crisis has succeeded in reaffirming the value of population history not just as a critique of past abuses, but as a resource for thinking about the demographic dilemmas of the present.