Population: A Concept in Crisis?

9-10 novembre 2025

Mme Jolene Yiqiao Kong, IHEID Mme Arushi Sahay, IHEID Mme Sachiyo Yagi, IHEID

Prof. Aditya Bharadwaj, IHEID

Dr. Zeynep Gurtin, University College London

Prof. Marcia Inhorn, Yale University

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.

Therme 51 • Hotel Physio & Spa, Leukerbad

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