Positioning the Fertility Decline Between Numbers and Narratives in Eritrea (1991-2020)
Primary tabs
The nature of fertility regimes and their ongoing transformations play a central role in population studies whereas the onset of the fertility transition in sub-Saharan Africa challenges Eurocentric explanations and promotes new understanding.
Eritrea, a ‘young’ nation in the Horn of Africa, characterised by a thirty-year liberation struggle, high mobility, and a biopolitical turn that have affected the structure and dynamics of its small population, is valuable case study to unpack the drivers of fertility. The research moves from demographic theories concerning the fertility decline, questions the anthropological interpretations of reproductive behaviour patterns, and provides a contextualised analysis of the fertility transition in Eritrea (1990-2020). Drawing on extensive fieldwork, as well as on available guesstimates, the research aims at acquainting a set of tools to prevent misinterpretations and disclose the narratives beyond the numbers.
Speaker
Valentina Fusari is a visiting fellow at the African Studies Centre Leiden. She graduated in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at the University of Siena, holds a PhD in Geopolitics (University of Pisa, 2011), and attended the Collen Program on Fertility, Education and the Environment (University of Oxford, 2014). From 2012 to 2014, she was assistant professor at the Adi Keih College of Arts and Social Sciences (Eritrea) and from the academic year 2014–15, she is adjunct professor of Population, Development and Migration at the University of Pavia, where she is currently postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences. Her research is broadly rooted in demographic anthropology, social history, and colonial demography, and promotes an interdisciplinary perspective. Her research interests focus on fertility, hidden populations, and mixed ancestry people in the Horn of Africa.
Date, time and location
03 June 2021
15.30 - 17.00
Online event
Registration
Posted on 18 May 2021, last modified on 12 September 2021