Demographic Desires: Medicine, Media, and Emergency Contraception in India Book Talk
This presentation flips the demographic anxiety narrative, focusing instead on demographic desires that shape lives beyond the state's concerns.
Dr. Nayantara Sheoran Appleton - Senior Lecturer in the School of Science in Society
There is a well-rehearsed conversation about demographic anxieties amongst scholars examining the state’s focus and control on the reproductive lives of its citizenry. I want to ‘flip on its head’ this demographic anxiety narrative, to instead talk about ‘demographic desires’ that exist and shape lives beyond the state’s focus. In the book I posit that this historical anxiety has been recast as desire in contemporary India to continue unabashed historical ‘population control’ projects. The research shows an adjacency politics of placing demographic desires, alongside demographic anxiety, to account for the way people are interpellated into a politics of reproductive management in contemporary India. The book draws on debates in feminist medical anthropology, feminist STS and cultural studies.
Dr. Nayantara Sheoran Appleton is a Senior Lecturer at the Interdisciplinary School of Science in Society at Te Hergenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington. Her scholarship looks at hormones, contraception, demographic logics, and ethnographic methods. In addition to the book she is talking about, she’s co-edited two other books and written in academic and non-academic space. She is currently working on new research titled Social Lives of Sex Hormones, funded by the Royal Society’s Marsden Fast Start and developing the Reproductive Futures Lab.
This seminar will be held ‘in person’.