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 oppositionโits meanings, mediations, and mobilisationsโdemands urgent reassessment. From the suppression of dissent to the strategic invocation of โthe peopleโ 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 populationโfrom 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 โwastelandsโ 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 โ 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 โGreat Acceleration,โ 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?
Our “Populating the 1980s: A decade revisited” online seminar series has wrapped for 2023, and will be returning in March 2024. The series, convened by Dr Aprajita Sarcar, considers the afterlife of demographic transition in different political geographies. Asking whether 1980s population policy should be read as an artifact of previous decades, or a new field in itself, the series brings together scholars to re-theorise population policy and discourse in this often-understudied decade.
Speakers for 2023 included Mytheli Sreenivas on South Asia, Sanjam Ahluwalia on India, Aya Homei on Japan, Raรบl Antonio Necochea on Peru, and Sarah Mellors Rodriguez on China. Their presentations are now all available to watch below and on the series page.
29 March 2023, Mytheli Sreenivas (Ohio State), โSouth Asia, Population Planning and National Imaginations: A Discussion on Method and Periodizationโ
In our first session of the “Populating the 1980s” series Professor Mytheli Sreenivas (Ohio State) was joined by Darshi Thoradeniya (University of Colombo) and Amna Qayyum, to discuss reproductive politics in South Asia.
26 April 2023, Sanjam Ahluwalia (Northern Arizona University), โEntertainment Interruptus: Films Division of Indiaโs Messaging on Population Control, Family Planning, and Happiness, in the 1980sโ
In the second session of the โPopulating the 1980sโ series, we welcomed Associate Professor Sanjam Ahluwalia (Northern Arizona University), who discussed the use of films to propagate family planning messages in India in the 1980s.
24 May 2023, Aya Homei (Manchester University), โUnder the Name of Friendship: Population Politics & Sino-Japanese Cooperation in Family Planning in the 1980sโ
In our third session of the “Populating the 1980s” series, Dr Aya Homei (Manchester University) joins Dr Aprajita Sarcar (UNSW) to discuss Sino-Japanese cooperation on family planning in the 1980s.
11 October 2023, Raรบl Antonio Necochea (University of North California), โFrom Demographic to Discursive Explosion: New Players & Priorities in 1980s Peruโ
In our fourth session of the “Populating the 1980s” series, Associate Professor Raรบl Antonio Necochea (Uni. of North California) joined Dr Aprajita Sarcar to discuss demographic debates in 1980s Peru.
15 November 2023, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez (Missouri State University), โFrom Pronatalism to Just One Child and Back Again: The Making and Unmaking of Chinaโs One Child Policyโ
In our fifth session of the “Populating the 1980s” series, Associate Professor Sarah Mellors Rodriguez (Missouri State University) discussed the evolution of Chinaโs reproductive politics since the 1980s. Her paper is entitled: “From Pronatalism to Just One Child and Back: The Making and Unmaking of Chinaโs One Child Policy.”
In July 2023, the Laureate Centre was delighted to welcome distinguished visiting scholars Prof Duncan Kelly & Prof David Nally from Cambridge, who joined conversations on population & the anthropocene, and helped workshop papers with Laureate Centre & affiliated researchers.
Population and the Anthropocene Workshop, 20th July
This half-day discussion brought together scholars from UNSW Environment & Society with Alison Bashford, Prof Duncan Kelly and Prof David Nally to ask how scholars think about population and its history in the Anthropocene, especially given its primacy in the indicators of a great acceleration since 1950s.
‘Festival of Ideas,’ Quarantine Station (Sydney), 25-26th July
Laureate Centre & affiliated researchers gathered at the Quarantine Station, Sydney, to workshop papers on population policy, health & medical history, quarantine, immigration and more. The intensive, two days of discussion included a tour of the historic Quarantine Station grounds led by Centre Director Alison Bashford.
At the recent โPopulation Through the Cameraโ workshop, organised by the Laureate Centre for History and Population at UNSW, scholars from diverse backgrounds discussed how photography sees and unsees populations within a landscape. The workshop concentrated on the Asia-Pacific region, where modern histories of population transfer, colonialism, and photography are set against complex backgrounds of settler expansion, environmental change, economic exploitation, and civilising missions. Particular themes that resonated across all papers were the use of photographs to erase or emphasis certain demographics in an environment, the photographsโ (at times ambiguous) archival context, and the broader role of photography in colonial and settler projects.
Anne Maxwell, the keynote speaker, started the day by introducing us to a series of six female settler photographers active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discussing how they chose to present the land they inhabited as well as its original inhabitants. Few women had access to this new technology and the likenesses they produced were shaped in part by social restrictions in who they could photograph and how they could approach their subject matter. Interestingly, Maxwell showed that even within this small cohort, photography was pursued for a range of reasons: artistic, financial, and political. A central argument through her presentation and indeed throughout the day was how the act of photography facilitated the narratives of settler and colonial communities. These ranged from a โgenteel forgettingโ of indigenous communities that inhabited supposedly โemptyโ landscapes, through the insertion of indigenous labour as an extension of colonial development projects, to the foregrounding and celebration of settler populations against transformed landscapes. How, for instance, Maxwell asked, does a collage of white children presented as โGems of Victoriaโ erase the presence of a much larger indigenous population in this Australian state? And what do we make of the portrait photograph of a smiling Mฤori woman from the oeuvre of one female photographer from which indigenous populations are otherwise largely absent? Her presence in this set of photographs is significant both because of its singularity and because it reminds us to critically assess the archive as a whole.
In fact, all speakers grappled with questions about the archive. Where do photographs sit within archives often made up primarily of textual sources? Or how should we read series and individual snapshots? Jarrod Hore and Maurits Meerwijk considered photographic archives created to support a singular perspective: produced by individual photographers for commercial albums or different photographers to accompany government reports. Chi Chi Huang, Suzanne Claridge, and Emma Thomasโ photographs were produced more incidentally and over time. Some were destined for the archive, others were not. Many of these photographs had complex lives: removed from albums, decontextualised, and reproduced to suit new narratives. For example, Huang traced the reproduction of one photograph of a Chinese street originally taken by John Thompson over a period of three decades. It gained new meanings with each iteration, begging the question: to which archive does this photograph belong?
From here, a recurring question was how these photographs were organised and captioned. It became evident across all papers that captions subtly direct the gaze of the observer toward overarching narratives of colonial relations between people and the land. For instance, photographs of โpaydayโ on a Fijian plantation in Claridgeโs presentation obscured the indentured nature of the migrant workers photographed. Similarly, the parentheses around the word โlabourโ in the caption of a photograph by Alfred Burton in one of his commercial albums discussed by Hore, transformed a group of Fijians from the original inhabitants of the island into an economic resource โ much like the landscape behind them.
In fact, the violent and exploitative nature of settler and colonial life as captured by the camera was a dominant theme throughout our discussions. Maxwellโs photographs of settler landscapes from which local populations had been forcibly removed offered an oblique perspective on such violence. More blatantly, such exploitation was immediately visible in Thomasโ discussion of indigenous female labour in photographs from German New Guinea. The composition and editing of the womenโs bodies captured the gendered and racialised nature of colonial power and its inherent violence. Interestingly, it is precisely because of the rarity of these images that the erased presence of female labour in German New Guinea becomes all the more powerful and striking.
Finally, in Meerwijkโs photographs of โhealthy publicsโ in the Dutch East Indies receiving medical care from a โbenignโ colonial state contain subtle overtones of coercion and violence. Orderly queues of demographically organised subjects suggest discipline, surveillance, and local appreciation for Western-style medical intervention among a much larger population โ while the subtle presence of uniformed law enforcers in the background of many photographs suggests the coercive nature of many such encounters.
Frequently histories of population focus on the implementation and impact of policies and programs, but what this workshop has shown is the power of the camera to guide those conversations. A special issue is currently being planned from this workshop. It will be led by Jarrod Hore and Chi Chi Huang.
Over Thursday 23rd and Friday 24th June, the Laureate Centre for History and Population hosted a conference on population theory in the age of revolutions โ part of an ongoing project led by Laureate Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Stephen Pascoe.
The project, โRethinking Population in an Age of Revolution,โ interrogates how we might make sense of the revival of interest in the population question during the late revolutionary age. It considers the emergence of key texts in the production of knowledge about population โ penned by such thinkers as Malthus, Volney, and Adam Smith โ and explores how the production of demography in diverse contexts around the world was shaped by the profound global upheaval of this period. The revolutionary moment of the 1770s and 1780s had remade conceptions of citizenship and subjecthood, and of populations and states, from North America to France to Haiti and beyond. By the late 1790s, revolutionary fervour continued in some parts of the world, while reactionary politics had emerged elsewhere.
As a first stage in the collaborative project, this two-day workshop brought together scholars of the Middle East, the Caribbean, India, and of the British and French empires. Participants examined how emergent ideas of statecraft, population and empire took expression in this revolutionary moment, reflecting on how the population question shaped the struggles over land and territory in this period, from Egypt, Ireland, the Antilles, India, to North America and contested territories beyond.
Through such case studies, participating scholars considered how conceptions of the domain of the social, and of โthe peopleโ were reconfigured in this period. This allowed reflection on the ways in which new imaginaries of population, against the backdrop of revolutionary, anti-revolutionary and postrevolutionary debates, shaped concern for the government of life, in both metropolitan and colonial spaces.
Plans are now underway to produce a special journal edition based on this productive exchange of ideas. This will be led by Stephen Pascoe (Laureate Centre for History & Population, UNSW) and Professor Ian Coller (University of California, Irvine), who will work together to further elaborate the key themes of the collection. Publication of the special issue is anticipated for mid-2023.
