Format 

Six weekly seminars of 1 hour 15 minutes, followed by discussion. The series is intended to form the basis of an edited

volume. For further details and to submit abstracts, please contact the Convenors:

Peter William Walsh (peter.walsh@compas.ox.ac.uk) or Philip Kreager (philip.kreager@ihs.ox.ac.uk)

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Rationale

Migration has become the pivotal variable in the demography of the UK and much of the developed world. The ONS's

2024-based national population projections (April 2026) suggest that all UK population growth over the coming decade

will arise from net international migration, with natural change – births minus deaths – turning negative. Yet the relation-

ship between migration and demographic change runs far deeper than this short-term arithmetic. Migration shapes, and

is shaped by, fertility, mortality, partnership formation, and health across the life course and across generations; and it

has done so throughout history, in patterns that complicate the standard narratives of demographic transition.

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This series brings together history, anthropology, and demography with contemporary migration studies. A basic finding

of recent scholarship is that fertility has been heterogeneous across most populations in history(1). Low and below-replacement completed fertility is not a uniquely modern phenomenon, and migration has repeatedly been implicated in producing it — through delayed or foregone marriage, unstable employment and partnerships, inadequate family and kin support networks, poor health and living conditions, and elevated maternal and child mortality. Current anxieties about depopulation are therefore not new and may well be exaggerated. The series asks two overarching questions. First, what are the fertility, mortality, and wider life-course processes and outcomes of migrants after their departure from their natal communities? Second, what role does migration play — as cause, consequence, and putative policy remedy — in low-fertility communities and in whole societies in many parts of the world in the past and present?

(1) Low Fertilities in the Past and Present: Studies in Compositional Demography, ed. Yuliya Hilevych and Philip Kreager.  The British Academy,  London: 2026.