Planet, Population and Rights [Audio]

Speaker(s): Dr Julia Corwin, Carina Hirsch, Yamini Mishra, Professor Wendy Sigle | The headlines remind us daily that we are hurtling towards a planetary emergency. The dire warnings of catastrophic and irreversible environmental disaster suggest the shape of our world will change fundamentally. Calls to action often draw simplistically on fears of overpopulation, misrepresenting the complex relationship between demographic trends and climate change. Julia Corwin (@JulesCorwin) is Assistant Professor in Environment at the Department of Geography and Environment, LSE. Her work focuses on the politics of global environmental governance and its relationship to the informal economy and global trade. Her research has focused on global flows of electronic ‘waste’ and their revaluation through economies of repair and maintenance in India, conducted through a patchwork ethnography of local markets understood as significant sites in global capital networks. Carina Hirsch is an Advocacy & Projects Manager at the Margaret Pyke Trust. Carina has been committed to improving the status of women and girls for over 10 years within UN agencies, International NGOs and at the Margaret Pyke Trust since joining in 2015. She has solid field experience implementing projects to improve the lives of rural women in Niger, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso and India. Yamini Mishra (@Yamini___Mishra) is the Director of Gender, Sexuality and Identity at Amnesty International, providing leadership and vision to the world’s largest human rights movement on gender and discrimination. Prior to this she was the Regional Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) Specialist for the Regional Office for Asia Pacific for UN Women. Before joining UN Women, Yamini was the Executive Director, Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA), Delhi, an organisation which does cutting edge work on governance issues using budget analysis as the entry point. Wendy Sigle is Professor of Gender and Family Studies at the Department of Gender Studies. She has worked on a variety of issues related to families and family policy in historical and contemporary societies. Her research is is quantitative and applies both econometric and demographic methods to the analysis of secondary survey data or data drawn from official government records. Additionanly, her research critiques how quantitative methods are applied and how quantitative evidence is used and interpreted, particular in a policy context. Laura J Brown (@Lolabear88) is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow based at the Department of International Development at LSE. Her research focuses on links between the environment and women’s health, with a particular focus on maternal and reproductive health and behaviour. Laura holds a first class BSc in Biological Anthropology from the University of Kent as well as an MSc in Reproductive & Sexual Health Research and a PhD in Epidemiology & Population Health (Demography), both from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.