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

本项目记录了从1920年到2010年全球人口、人口科学和人口政治的交织历史，重点关注人口预测、未来规模和结构的估计，以检查这三个领域之间的相互关系。利用档案研究和主要出版物的内容分析，它将询问人口变化如何刺激人口统计学的出现，人口统计学如何告知人口政治，人口政治如何指导人口统计学的发展，以及人口统计学如何通过人口政策影响人口增长。该项目将人口预测视为边界对象，是人口、人口科学和人口政治之间的一个关键接口，它允许科学家和政策制定者在没有必要就分析条款或干预目标达成一致的情况下一起工作，并表明人口预测的目标往往不仅仅是估计未来的人口动态，而是通过它们所激发和证明的计划来影响它们。这一研究计划是为20世纪人口历史撰写的第一本书，当时世界人口增长比以往任何时候都要快；在此期间，人口统计学成为一门新科学，也是政府、政府间机构和慈善组织干预的一种手段。这本书将弥合当前文学中对两次世界大战之间欧洲人口下降的焦虑和战后对世界其他地区人口过剩的焦虑之间的鸿沟。因为它将在所谓的战后“全球人口危机”出现之前开始，它将记录这场危机的科学和政治成果，而不是将其视为人口科学和人口政治发展的背景。潜在的更广泛影响本项目的更广泛影响源于其分析和描述人口估计和预测所依据的智力状况的目标。政策制定者、科学家和活动家利用人口数据和人口预测来建立经济、生态和其他类型的模型，并为干预提供信息，了解和关注这些情况，可以帮助他们在人口研究和其他领域建立更准确的模型和有效的干预措施。

IntroductionThis 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 MeritThe 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 ImpactsThe 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.