Our 2-day workshop, titled "Population: A Concept in Crisis?", aims to explore the intricate and often contentious discourse surrounding the longstanding "population problem", including the biopolitical concerns and moral panics captured within and between imminent and predicted booms, explosions and declines. These are almost always framed through the language of crisis. How can we better apprehend the existing contours and limits of population as a concept? In what ways can different disciplines begin to grapple with, challenge, advance, modify, and reimagine its boundaries?

The problem-space of population – and debates relating to fertility, mortality, ageing, migration, and so on – has long been central to disciplines such as demography, economics, epidemiology, and the biomedical sciences. It has also profoundly shaped policy interventions and public perceptions around the pressing necessity of controlling, managing, and engineering the population arithmetic. One of our key objectives is therefore to theoretically foreground and reflect upon the question of crisis: (i) the persistent language of crisis that continues to undergird the framing of population, and
(ii) the crisis of population itself as a category – its conceptual limits, empirical contradictions, and the alternative trajectories and problematisations we might begin to imagine.

To guide our conversations, we are honoured to welcome Marcia Inhorn, Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University, whose groundbreaking work on reproductive technologies, infertility, and gendered biomedical politics has profoundly shaped global debates on population, particularly in the Middle East. We are also delighted to host Aditya Bharadwaj, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute, whose long-standing research into science, biomedicine, and reproductive governance across the Global South brings critical insight into how population knowledge is produced, contested, and transformed.

We invite participants from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds to contribute historical, qualitative, quantitative, ethnographic, and theoretical perspectives drawn from their own research. By fostering dialogue across anthropology, sociology, gender studies, science and technology studies, demography, and public health, we aim to develop a multifaceted conversation that bridges situated accounts of reproductive and demographic life with broader transnational dynamics. This will enable us to reflect critically on the current epistemological and political moment in which the concept of population finds itself under renewed scrutiny.