Overview

PopFest is a not-for-profit conference organised by, and for, graduate, postgraduate and PhD students studying population. In 2025, the Centre for Population Change and Connecting Generations worked with the British Society for Population Studies to convene the conference at the University of Southampton.

The primary aim of PopFest is to help population researchers in the early stages of their academic careers to develop their skills and ideas and to meet new people and network.

PopFest 2025 welcomed 30 delegates from across the globe. The conference featured over 20 presentations and a poster session with 10 posters. The event had seven sessions which included the following themes: Unions, Family and Fertility; Global Health, Wellbeing and Mortality; Ethnicity, Migration, and Migrant Populations; Spatial Issues, Environment, and Sustainability; Ageing and Intergenerational Relations; Critical Demography, Life Course Events, Human Capital.

The event featured two keynote lectures, the first delivered by Professor Jane Falkingham CBE on "Lessons from the life of a demographer", and the second by Dr Antonino Polizzi, who presented "The causes and consequences of growing life expectancy shortfalls".

The event was kindly sponsored by the British Society for Population Studies, Centre for Population Change - Connecting Generations, Department of Social Statistics and Demography, and the School of Economic, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Southampton, National Centre for Research Methods, European Association for Population Studies, the Population Health Research Group at the Royal Geographic Society, and the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership.

PopFest 2025 Book of Abstracts