Doctoral Dissertation Research: Global Population, Population Science, and Population Politics in the Twentieth Century

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Introduction This project documents the intertwined histories of global population, population science, and population politics from 1920 to 2010, focusing on population projections, estimates of future size and structure, to examine the mutual relationships between these three domains. Using archival research and content analysis of key publications, it will ask how population change stimulated the emergence of demography, how demography informed population politics, how population politics directed the development of demography, and how demography, through population policy, influenced population growth. The project treats population projections as boundary objects, a critical interface between population, population science, and population politics that allowed scientists and policy makers to work together without necessarily agreeing on the terms of analysis or goals of intervention, and suggests that population projections have often aimed not just to estimate future population dynamics, but to influence them via the programs they inspire and justify. Intellectual Merit The proposed research is for the first book-length history of demography in the twentieth-century when the world population increased more rapidly than ever before; during this time, demography became a new science and a means of intervention for governments, intergovernmental agencies, and philanthropic organizations. The book will bridge the divide in the current literature between interwar anxieties about population decline in Europe and postwar anxieties about overpopulation in the rest of the world. Because it will begin before the emergence of the so-called postwar "global population crisis," it will document the scientific and political production of that crisis, rather than treating it as the context in which population science and population politics developed. Potential Broader Impacts The broader impacts of this project stem from its goal of analyzing and describing the intellectual conditions under which population estimates and projections are produced. Understanding of and attention to these conditions by the policy makers, scientists, and activists who use demographic data and population projections to produce economic, ecological, and other types of models, and to inform interventions, could help them create more accurate models and effective interventions, both in population studies and in other arenas.