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.
" was used to fund archival research by the co-PI for a dissertation fulfilling the requirements of the Ph.D. program in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. During the summer of 2012, she read and photographed documents relating to the history of demography, population politics, and population policy at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, and the United Nations archives in New York. Analysis of these documents will form the core of a dissertation examining the impact of population change and population politics on the development of demographic science in the United States between 1920 and 1984, and on the reciprocal impact of demography on global population and global population policy. The co-PI has presented preliminary results at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association (2012) and the annual meeting of the Population Association of America (2013). The research carried out for this project indicates that demography was strongly shaped by its supporters – most of whom were not scientists – and by its funding agencies – initially philanthropic foundations and then the United States government. The dissertation will examine the effects of this influence and the population politics that informed it. It will be the first book-length history of demography in the twentieth century, and the first treatment of twentieth-century population thought to examine the scientific and ideological underpinnings of the global crisis of perceived overpopulation. It will make important contributions to science studies/STS/history of science, and will make demographers and users of demographic data and projections – including demographers, economists, ecologists, urban and regional planners, and policy-makers – more aware of the conditions of production of the data and analyses they use. The co-PI hopes that the resulting dissertation will also make readers more skeptical of claims of actual and impending overpopulation and more attuned to alternative approaches to global problems that are silenced by focus on population control, such as aid for international development as a solution to global poverty and conservation as a solution to environmental degradation.
