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Gender inequality in Nepal: How can we tackle sex-selective abortion?
Last month I travelled to Nepal to disseminate research (funded by the Birth Control Trust), that I have been leading there concerning the emergence of sex-selective abortion. A culture o...
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Recalibration 2016
In 1906 Francis Galton visited the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition, a country fair in Plymouth, where he witnessed a competition to guess the weight of a fat ox. For a sixpence, th...
How to change the world!
How to change the world! The bold and challenging title of a conference held recently in London, organized by the How to: Academy in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s Oxford Marti...
Is the transition state between childhood and adulthood the root of social anxiety produced by teen motherhood?
As many of you know I am a huge fan of Mary Douglas’ work. In particular her concept of transition: “danger lies in transitional states, simply because a transition is neither one state...
The Political Economy of Childbearing: Impressions from Bethlehem
During our recent honeymoon, my husband and I visited the West Bank and Bethlehem. As Christmas approaches, many of us remember Jesus Christ was born here 2,015 years ago in poor conditions &...
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Can polygamy be merged with modern British values?
The starting point for this post was the Seminar ‘Marrying out’ for love: women’s narratives of polygyny and alternative marriage choices in contemporary Senegal’. Pol...
Ageing, loneliness and homogeneity: let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater
With the sound of bonfire night fireworks still ringing in our ears, and the last of the Halloween sweets just about polished off, it must be time for the retail sector to start the run up to Chris...
Interesting Links 2
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (Selection) This Openpop blog is written by one of the foremost authorities on the topic of sex-selection (choosing the sex of one’s offsprin...
Is there my beginning in my end? Reflections on generating intergenerational interaction in India
Currently there are more than 30 million orphans estimated in India. Only about 2,500 were adopted last year, down from 5,700 four years ago (http://www.unicef.org/publications/files/SOWC_2015_Summ...
Measuring active ageing
The Human Development Index and the Corruption Perceptions Index are two well-known examples of composite indicators that are used both to produce international rankings of country performance, and...
Childbearing and family life in a context of political-economic change: Insights from fieldwork among the Karen in Thailand and Burma
For my forthcoming book Learning, Migration and Intergenerational Relations I conducted fieldwork between November 2013 and January 2014 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I stayed there for six weeks to rev...
Why do French women live longer than English?
I have long been intrigued by the differential life expectancy between English women and our near neighbours – the French. Since 1945 there has been a consistent 2 year gap between French and...
What jobs will centenarians be doing at the end of the century?
“What jobs will centenarians be doing at the end of the century?” asked the man from the BBC…. Rohit Talwar, a futurologist, had declared at last week’s Headmasters&rsqu...
Is low fertility a problem?
Latest Government figures showed the city had the fourth lowest number of births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 in the UK in 2014, with 43.9. Only the City of London, Camden a...
Migration is reshaping the family
2015 may well be seen as a transitional year in terms of cross-border migration. Already in 2013, 232 million people – 3.2 per cent of the world's population – lived outside their c...