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Programme of 2014 Quetelet Seminar: 40th edition
Over the last centuries, marriage and the family have undergone dramatic transformations, both in industrialized and less developed countries. Within recent decades, new patterns have emerged, such as blended families or same-sex couples, while divorce rates have increased. During this period, fertility has gone down while voluntary childlessness became more frequent modifying the distribution of family types among economic and social groups. This transformation has been accompanied by deep value changes and modifications of women’s social status and roles in society.
Demographers as well as other social scientists like sociologists and economists are involved in research projects aiming at both providing new insights on the mechanisms that drive these transformations and better understanding social and economic consequences of these changes. In a complementary way, philosophers and lawyers explore the normative assessment of the ethical questions that are raised. Philosphers construct ethical recommendations for population and family policies and tackle the question of optimal population size. Lawyers enforce legal rules about fertility and the family.
The Center for Research in Demography and Societies at Université catholique de Louvain invites researchers from all these disciplines and beyond to the 40th edition of the Quetelet Seminar. The main objective of this seminar aims at presenting the most advanced works on "Fertility, childlessness and the family". The spirit of the seminar will be interdisciplinary ; each session will include presentations of demographers and of other social scientists.
The second afternoon of the seminar (November 06th) will be dedicated to the lauching of an intersciplinary book about "Distance and family, marital and sexual ties : an interdisciplinary approach" that has been coordinated by the CIRFASE. For this lauching, four international experts from demography, sociology and psychology, will discuss the main ideas of the book in the light of their own researchs in this field.