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.
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.
Contributions now invited for the Populating the 1980s: A Decade Revisited edited volume. Contact a.sarcar@unsw.edu.au for more information.
About:
For global negotiations over the population, the 1980s was a bridging decade. In the 1970s, population control through “family planning” as a development aid program boomed and waned. In the 1990s, the rhetoric of human and environmental rights was fully embedded in the policy discussion of the global population trend. What, then, marked the 1980s in terms of the global, regional, national, and local level discussions on population? Were there population practices specific to the decade? Was the 1980s really a bridging decade or can we characterize it in alternative ways? What insights would the perspective on the 1980s bring to the historiography? Populating the 1980s: A Decade Revisited aims to engage with these questions.
In addition to this, Populating the 1980s aims to address the lacunae created by the existing scholarship. Historians know much about population politics until the 1980s. Social scientific work has dominated the relevant scholarship since. Through Populating the 1980s we also aim to “populate” the historiography of this understudied period.
We are seeking contributors to Populating the 1980s: A Decade Revisited. We invite proposals that engage with historical scholarship on population politics and with topics including but not limited to:
Family planning in primary health, in particular maternal and child health
Eugenics and/or population quality
Population quantity and mobility
Feminist engagement with population politics
The pro-life vs pro-choice politics
Neoliberalisation
Reproductive technologies
Environment, resource, and population
Fertility decline
China’s one-child policy
The 1984 United Nations International Conference on Population in Mexico City
Please submit paper proposals which include: a title, abstract (300 words maximum), and a short CV (150 words maximum) to Aprajita Sarcar (a.sarcar@unsw.edu.au) by March 5th, 2024.
Centre Director Alison Bashford’s latest book, An Intimate History of Evolution: The story of the Huxley family has won the 2023 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award.
The Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award recognises works that combine excellence in research, literary merit, readability and value to the community, and is presented by the Waverley Council. You can read more about the awards, and view the full long and short lists via the Waverley Council website.
An Intimate History of Evolution tells the story of the Huxleys: the Victorian natural historian T H Huxley, and his grandson, the scientist, conservationist, and zoologist Julian Huxley. Between them, the Huxleys communicated to the world the story of the theory of evolution by natural selection. It is published by University of Chicago Press & Allen Lane, and is available for purchase via the University of Chicago Press website.
The 2023 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award was announced at the Bondi Pavilion on the 9th November 2023. Photos courtesy of Waverley Council.
Professor Alison Bashford’s book The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution (Allen Lane/University of Chicago Press) has been longlisted for two awards: the 2023 Cundill History Prize and the 2023 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award, and shortlisted for the British Society for the History of Science’s 2023 Hughes Prize.
Bashford’s book charts 200 years of modern science and culture through the Huxley family.
The respective long and short lists for these awards are available by following the links below:
For more details about The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution, or to purchase a copy of the book, visit the University of Chicago Press website.
Laureate Centre Director, Professor Alison Bashford, has just launched her latest book, An Intimate History of Evolution:The Story of the Huxley Family.
Out with Allen Lane, this work charts 200 years of modern science and culture through the family history of the Huxley family.
“Full of surprises on every page, this book makes you wonder why all history can’t have the engaging intimacy of a novel. Bashford brilliantly marries intellectual history with the story of four generations of a great family in a literary tour de force.”
PROFESSOR JIM SECORD, AUTHOR OF VISIONS OF SCIENCE
About the book:
In his early twenties, poor, racked with depression, stranded in the Coral Sea on the seemingly endless survey mission of HMS Rattlesnake, hopelessly in love with the young Englishwoman Henrietta Heathorn, Thomas Henry Huxley was a nobody. And yet together he and Henrietta would return to London and go on to found one of the great intellectual and scientific dynasties of their age.
The Huxley family through four generations profoundly shaped how we all see ourselves. In innumerable fields observing both nature and culture, they worked as scientists, novelists, mystics, film-makers, poets and – perhaps above all – as public lecturers, educators and explainers.
Their speciality was evolution in all its forms – at the grandest level of species, deep time, the Earth, and at the most personal and intimate. They shaped great organizations – the Natural History Museum, Imperial College, the London Zoo, UNESCO, the World Wildlife Fund – and they shaped fundamentally how we see ourselves, as individuals and as a species, one among many.
But perhaps their greatest subject was themselves. Alison Bashford’s marvellously engaging and original new book interweaves the Huxleys’ momentous public achievements with their private triumphs and tragedies. The result is the history of a family, but also a history of humanity grappling with its place in nature. This book shows how much we owe – for better or worse – to the unceasing curiosity, self-absorption and enthusiasms of a small, strange group of men and women.
