Asst. Prof. Dr. Tyler Zoanni 

The workshop “Beyond Demographic Destiny” seeks to challenge the ways in which

public debates and mass media invoke demographic factors as if they were

mechanical causal levers for all kinds of transformation: aging societies, patterns of

migration, environmental degradation, economic growth, and more. The workshop

will also try to think beyond some recent proposals from science-and-technology

studies (STS) that denounce demography and population-level thinking as inevitably

racist and anti-democratic. Convening a distinguished international group of

scholars within the critical social sciences—anthropology, history, sociology, STS—I

hope to foster new approaches, collaborations, and publications that will enable

fresh takes on demographic possibilities. The word possibilities is here key; rather

than assume demographic forces are natural kinds that drive human affairs, we will

examine the making of demographic knowledge and its translations into politics,

media, economy, and social and cultural life. At the same, the workshop will take

seriously demography as a social and material force. Along these lines, the

workshop asks not only how we can think simply for or against demography, but how

research, activism, and policy-making can think with demography for the sake of

more just, equal, and democratic futures.