Fudan-LSE Lecture Series No.53

Title: 

Fertility exhaustion in the 21st century

Speaker: 

Ayo Wahlberg, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

Host: 

Prof. Jianfeng Zhu, School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University

Discussant:

Associate Prof. Mei Ding, School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University

Cohost：

Fudan-European Centre for China Studies；Nordic Centre

Nordic Centre at Fudan University

Time: 

12:00-13:20 (Beijing Time), April 9th

Venue: 

Room 805E, 8thFloor，West Sub-building of Guanghua Towers

Please click the link to sign up

The Speaker：

Ayo Wahlberg is Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Working in the field of social studies of (bio)medicine, his research has focused on the modernization of traditional herbal medicine (in Vietnam and the United Kingdom), reproductive and genetic technologies (in China and Denmark), health metrics (in clinical trials and global health) as well as chronic living (through a multi-country study entitled The Vitality of Disease - Quality of Life in the Making). Ayo is the author of the award-winning book Good Quality – the Routinization of Sperm Banking in China and co-editor of Selective Reproduction in the 21st Century.

Abstract: 

Throughout the world, fertility rates are falling while infertility rates are rising as women give birth to fewer children. The global fertility rate is estimated to have halved from 4.7 in 1950 to 2.4 in 2017. In this talk, rather than pointing to women’s increasing use of contraception, educational attainment and participation in paid labour (Vollset et al. 2020), I will argue that we might better understand the empirical demographic phenomena of fertility decline and low fertility by exploring which cultural, juridical and socio-economic factors are generative of what might be termed fertility exhaustion.