Author: historyandpopulation

Laureate Centre for History and Population, Morven Brown, lv.3, Room 353,
11 & 12 Dec 2025

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This two-day academic workshop invites early career researchers to critically and creatively examine the concept of opposition from a historical perspective, with a focus on its political, aesthetic, and institutional dimensions. As authoritarian tendencies intensify across global contexts, the category of opposition—its meanings, mediations, and mobilisations—demands urgent reassessment. From the suppression of dissent to the strategic invocation of ‘the people’ as a homogenous body, contemporary regimes increasingly rely on discourses of division, co-optation, and corporatist unity to manage populations and forestall genuine contestation. Crucially, rising authoritarianism is bound up with the history and politics of population—from immigration and labour policy to land, energy, and food governance, as well as anti-trans legislation and the broader biopolitics of sex, gender, and sexuality. These state strategies not only regulate bodies and social life but also delimit the conditions under which opposition can be conceived, organised, or enacted. This event will consider how opposition has been defined, resisted, framed, and refigured in diverse historical conjunctures, and will ask what remains possible under the sign of resistance.

Laureate Centre for History and Population,
22 & 23 Oct 2025 (Part 1) – 11 Nov 2025 (Part 2)

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Wilderness and waste, desert and empty space. Across the modern world, empires and nation-states have mobilised the idea of “wastelands” to claim territory, manage populations, and fuel economic growth: from the Qing empire to nineteenth century Australasia, from Hokkaido to the Russian steppe, from Progressive Era America to postwar Taiwan. What explains the global resonance of this idea? And how did its meaning transform across the 19th and 20th centuries – from underused land awaiting improvement to overused land destroyed by it?

This workshop brings together scholars of East Asia and the Anglo-world to work towards a history of modern wastelands. What does waste signify when attached to land? How does bringing East Asia and the Anglo-world into dialogue advance our understanding of global wastelands? What does the history of apparently empty spaces reveal about the modern territorial state? Where are wastelands in histories of global capitalism? And what about humans: the people who are pushed off, replaced, and confined to marginal spaces?

Drawing together intellectual history, imperial history, and environmental history, this workshop explores the possibilities that emerge when we place wastelands at the centre of modern world history.

Laureate Centre for History and Population, 26 Sep 2025

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Histories of pastoralism and histories of populations represent two central streams within the historiography of Australia, New Zealand Aotearoa, and the British Empire more broadly. Both livestock (living and as commodified bodily products) and humans criss-crossed the globe, driving colonial expansion, and remaking landscapes, economies, and diets. Later historiography has largely separated out the ways that nineteenth century thinkers on political economy and colonisation frequently thought about livestock and populations together, in terms of food, reproduction and occupation of land.

This small gathering of scholars with backgrounds in animal history, cultural history, environmental history, business history and settler colonial history will reunite these strands to explore what it means to include sheep and cattle in the histories of populations on the Australian continent up to the granting of responsible government to all the colonies (apart from Western Australia) in the mid to late 1850s.

Laureate Centre for History and Population, 12 Aug – 15 Sep 2024

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The Laureate Centre for History and Population is hosting four stellar scholars of reproductive politics in Asia. As part of these visits, we are organizing a series of talks and workshops in which we will discuss population in the Asian imagination. By examining topics like fertility control, family size, contraceptives and their popular imprints, we see how they were interpreted according to specific regional dynamics. Each of the Asian states planned their demographic interventions on assumedly universal categories and terms but with very different outcomes. Through the series, we understand how geography informs population dynamics and historical state transformations.