How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene?
Alison Bashford, Duncan David, David Nally
The “Great Acceleration” describes a set of interrelated human-driven transformations of Earth’s systems, including the eightfold population growth since 1800. Yet ideas about population in the epoch many call the Anthropocene sit uncomfortably in contemporary discussions.
How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene? brings together the world’s key thinkers in Anthropocene studies from a wide range of disciplines, including geology, geography, demography, history, political theory, and more. How do we think about population in the Anthropocene, or should we even think in terms of population at all? The twelve short essays in this pamphlet offer responses that reimagine how we think about economy, environment, consumption, reproduction and extinction.
A Final Laureate Symposium – 07 August 2026, State Library of NSW, Dixson Room
Populating Global History brings together the many historians who have worked across Alison Bashford’s research projects at UNSW Sydney since 2019. How have modern histories of land, disease, governance, humans, and other animals been rethought as geopolitics, biopolitics, cosmopolitics, and microbial politics? Conversations began with the New Earth Histories Research Program (2019-), followed by the Laureate Centre for History & Population (2021-26), and a suite of Australian Research Council-funded history of science projects (Antipodean Geology, Rethinking Medico-Legal Borders, Race Science and the Human Hand). In this final Laureate symposium, early-career historians will be joined by distinguished visitors, in conversation: Alessandro Antonello, David Armitage, Joanna Bourke, Peter Hobbins, and Marilyn Lake.
Professor Alison Bashford’s book Decoding the Hand. A History of Science, Medicine and Magic (University of Chicago Press, 2025) has been shortlisted for the 2026 Pickstone Prize.
Awarded biennially, the Pickstone Prize recognises the best scholarly book in the history of science, broadly construed, published in English in the last two years. Established in memory of Professor John Pickstone (1944–2014), the prize celebrates innovative and ambitious scholarship that advances our understanding of the scientific past.
Decoding the Hand is an astounding history of magic, medicine, and science, of an enduring search for how our bodily surfaces might reveal an inner self—a soul, a character, an identity. From sixteenth-century occult physicians influenced by the Kabbalah to twentieth-century geneticists, and from criminologists to eugenicists, award-winning historian Alison Bashford takes us on a remarkable journey into the strange world of hand readers, revealing how signs on the hand—its shape, lines, marks, and patterns—have been elaborately decoded over the centuries. Sometimes learned, sometimes outrageously deceptive, sometimes earnest, and, more often than we ever expected, medically and scientifically trained, these palm readers of the past prove to be essential links in the human quest to peer into bodies, souls, minds, and selves. Not only for fortune-telling palmists were the future and the past, health, and character laid bare in the hand, but for other experts in bodies and minds as well: anatomists, psychiatrists, embryologists, primatologists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and more.
Drawing telling parallels between the divination promised by palmistry and the appeal to self-knowledge offered by modern genetic testing, Decoding the Hand also makes clear that palm-reading is far from a relic or simple charlatanism. Bashford’s sagacious history of human hands touching and connecting opens wide the essential human pursuit of what lies within and beyond.
For more details about Decoding the Hand. A History of Science, Medicine and Magic, or to purchase a copy of the book, visit the University of Chicago Press website.
Laureate Centre for History and Population, Morven Brown, lv.3, Room 353, 11 & 12 Dec 2025
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)
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
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
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.
The interdisciplinary research group who first described a “Great Acceleration,” c. 1950, produced a suite of now-famous graphs depicting large-scale socio-economic changes. Significantly, the first displays world net population growth. In subsequent analysis of the Anthropocene, however, stark late modern changes in human fertility, mortality, ageing, and consumption have probably been the least discussed of all the variables. This is one measure of the highly successful critique of the problematisation of population. This small meeting brings key scholars of the Anthropocene, of population, of reproductive justice and of political ecology and economy together. How do we think about population in the Anthropocene?
