Dr. Jennifer D. Sciubba, the Stanley J. Buckman Professor of International Studies at Rhodes College, has launched a new podcast about global population trends and implications.
Everybody Counts, which is now available for download on iTunes, encourages conversation about the ways human population shapes our world. From mass urbanization to massive refugee flows, high fertility to record low birth rates, population trends have social, political, and economic consequences. The world’s population is changing in unprecedented ways, and this podcast helps listeners make sense of those changes.
In the first episode, Sciubba talks about what happens when women wait to have kids. Are celebrities who give birth for the first time after age 40 outliers, or are regular women really waiting that long to become mothers? She explores the research about super-low fertility and why a woman would choose to postpone childbearing. Sciubba is joined by author Elizabeth Katkin about the relationship between waiting to have kids and infertility.
As a political demographer, Sciubba is interested in understanding the impact of societal-level population changes on international and domestic politics, economics, and social relations. She teaches a variety of courses at Rhodes, including Population & National Security and The Politics of Migration.
Sciubba served as the Demographics Consultant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Policy) in Arlington, VA, where she worked on population, environment, and energy issues from 2006-2007. Today, she shares her research as a Global Fellow with the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, and as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Sciubba has authored books like The Future Faces of War: Population and National Security, and has also published chapters on political demography in Ageing Populations in Post-Industrial Democracies and Political Demography. Her research has appeared in International Interactions, International Area Studies Review, the Journal of Human Rights, and Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs, among others. Some of Sciubba’s opinion pieces have appeared in the LA Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and The New Security Beat blog, produced by the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Wilson Center. Her new book Everybody Counts will be released in 2019.