Date: September 18

Time: 11:30am-1pm

Location: Sage 5711

Population Panics in Illiberal Times: Shifting Demographic Dynamics, Climate Change and Conspiracy Theory

Obsessively preoccupied with “overpopulation,” ecofascist environmentalism calls for securing borders and deporting—or at its most extreme killing—what they call polluting “invaders.” The “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory is a cornerstone of ecofascist ideology that fuels domestic demographic anxieties.  It transmits the idea that liberal elites are strategically orchestrating mass immigration of non-white peoples to replace white populations on the decline. At the same time, a growing pronatalist movement worries about “underpopulation,” proposing extreme solutions such as to disenfranchise the childless.  This talk argues that, in the context of intensifying climate change impacts, populationist thinking and agendas tempt broad audiences by providing an easy scapegoat.  Analyzing how mainstream and extreme rhetoric on population amplify one another, I turn to feminist critics of population control to affirm the possibility of another future based on the vision articulated by reproductive and environmental justice movements.

Rajani Bhatia is an Associate Professor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of New York at Albany (SUNY).  Bhatia’s research interests lie in developing new approaches to feminist theorizations of reproduction and feminist science and technology studies. Topically, she has focused on issues that lie at the intersection of reproductive technologies, population sciences, health, bioethics and biomedicine.  Bhatia is the author of Gender before Birth: Sex Selection in a Transnational Context published as part of University of Washington Press’ Feminist Technosciences series, and her articles have appeared in Science, Technology, & Human Values, Catalyst: Feminist, Theory, Technoscience, and Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies.