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The fear of a global demographic explosion, starting in the early 20 th century, has prompted birth-control policies. According to Matthew Connelly, the will of men in the North to impact the behaviours of women in the South has been inefficient and hurtful. He describes humanity as a Janus-like figure, both an ideal and a field of confrontation.
2008
Demographers are an insular group. Although often located in departments of sociology or economics, at least in North America, their focus is often tightly trained on very specific issues within their discipline. Despite that, demography has been more involved in the formation and implementation of social policy than most of the social sciences; yet, the demographic literature contains rather few analyses of the relationship between demographic research and the institutions which promoted and executed population policies. It has taken an historian, Matthew Connelly, to write a history of the campaign to reduce fertility and control the growth of the human population. It is harsh reading for demographers. Some of the most famous individuals and leading institutions of our discipline come in for stinging criticism. But it is a story that all demographers and, indeed, any social scientist concerned about the relationship between research and social policy would do well to read. Connelly has written a sweeping history of efforts aimed at controlling the world's population in the twentieth century based not only on extensive archival research-the staple of historical scholarship-but also on interviews with some of the leading figures. It is a tendentious history that he is written. Connelly is not interested in simply cataloguing the various efforts at fertility reduction but in exposing what he believes was the arrogance and misguided ideas that drove the family planning programs supported by such institutions as USAID, UNFPA, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. At the core of all these efforts, he argues, was the sense that those directing the programs knew the interests of the poor and illiterate better than they did themselves. The result was programs in which the end-control over world population
2015
In many ways, this dissertation was a joy to write. I found the topic fascinating when I began writing and it continues to fascinate me today. Going to the archives shaped the story in ways that I did not expect when I wrote the prospectus but that only deepened my interest in and commitment to this project. The enthusiasm of my advisors, research subjects, and interlocutors helped keep my own enthusiasm for the project high, even through difficult and frustrating moments in the archives and while writing. I could not have written this dissertation without the assistance and support of many people and organizations. The seeds of this dissertation were sown in Barbara Anderson's demographic theory and methods courses in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan, which I attended in 2008-2009 at the urging of Myron Gutmann. Myron Gutmann and Barbara Anderson encouraged my critical interest in the history of demography, and this encouragement eventually led me back to the Department of History at the University of Michigan, which I had left after earning my M.A. in 2005. I am grateful to John Carson for agreeing to be my advisor at our very first meeting, and to Kali Israel, Farina Mir, Nancy Hunt, and Gabrielle Hecht, who helped me successfully petition for re-admission to the Ph.D. program. I am also grateful to all of the staff and faculty members of the department for helping me re-integrate into the program and balance it with full-time work at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The support and understanding of my supervisors and colleagues at ICPSR -including Myron Gutmann,
Asian Bioethics Review, 2021
Editorial for Special Issue on 'Reproduction, Demography and Cultural Anxieties in India and China'
In 2011, the global population reached 7 billion. Environmentalists, demographers and experts in development and public health renewed calls to regulate population growth in order to reduce poverty and conserve the world's resources for future generations. At the same time, China's one child policy, arguably one of the world's most well--known population control policies, has faced mounting criticism in light of recent evidence of highly coercive practices. The study of population is not limited to the jurisdiction of demography, a discipline concerned with the calculation and prediction of population growth and decline. Rather, the measurement of population is a deeply political process that determines the allocation of resources within society. Policymakers and their expert advisors in health, environment and the economy draw on demographic data to develop policies designed to regulate population such as access to contraception and abortion, work/family benefits, the regulation of assisted reproductive technology (ART) and adoption, and fertility incentives or disincentives. This class uses a feminist approach to trace the emergence of population science as a form of social regulation. We will examine how ideologies of race and gender have shaped historical and contemporary population discourse and policy around the world. We will identify and critique various phases in global population discourse and goals articulated by the United Nations, from the end of the colonial era to the Millennium Development Goals of 2000. Throughout the course, we will pay attention to the intersection between global and national population discourse and the everyday meanings and practices related to fertility and reproduction in women's lives. We will also investigate how population policies and technologies create new reproductive opportunities and constraints that are inextricably linked to broader gender and economic inequities between the global North and South. This course embraces a multi--disciplinary approach to studying population, drawing on literature from sociology, anthropology, political science, history, human rights, demography and epidemiology. Course objectives:
Australian Feminist Studies, 2008
In this essay, I initially examine the theoretical response to reproduction as an axis of biopolitics. I describe the way that reproduction has been discussed in biopolitical theory to date, and more specifically, examine reasons for its relative neglect in theorizations of biopower and biopolitics. I make a case for a more extensive engagement with questions of reproduction and sexual difference if biopolitical theory is to accurately describe the workings of biopower and biopolitics. Following that, I look at issues throughout the process of reproduction where biopolitical theory has been used to throw light on the politics of human reproduction. I consider three topics, corresponding to key aspects of reproductive politics: birth control, prenatal testing, and birth.
Conservation Biology, 1994
Gender, Place & Culture A Journal of Feminist Geography, 2019
Following the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 in Cairo, which prompted a discursive shift from population control to reproductive health and rights in international development, policy experts and scholars have relegated population control to the realm of history. This presents a unique challenge to feminist critics who seek to identify manifestations of population control in the present. In this article, we consider the potential of ‘populationism’ as terminology that may assist in clarifying varied new manifestations of population control. We explicate three interrelated populationist strategies that focus on optimizing numbers (demo), spaces (geo), and life itself (bio). Through our elaboration of these three populationisms and their interaction, we seek to inspire feminist, intersectional responses to the pernicious social, economic and environmental problems that technocratic populationist interventions obscure.
2010
Male and female elements are naturally present not only in human 'being but also in animal and plant world. In the animal and plant world the growth of number is governed by two opposite tendencies: the tendency to propagate their species and the struggle for life existence. But in human world alone the conflict of two opposing tendencies is complicated by other factors. They are: regard for the future which induces to control thefr natural impulses and the pressure of society on the individuals by religion, moral and legal sanctions for qUickening or retarding the growth of population (Marshall: 1974). Hence a regular ebb and flow of the opinion and state-policy have been observed as to encourage or discourage the growth of population. However, a highly negative consequences of high rate of population growth has been experienced by the developing countries. Hence,all most all the developing countries, now, are implementing population control policies of their own. The impact of...
Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization -- Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 3rd Ed 686p(2017)
I review this report of an old medical congress on reproductive medicine. Much has happened in the 17 years since its publication but the most urgent task of preventing further population growth has largely failed on a global scale. I try to bring it up to date and briefly discuss the inexorable disaster coming as the world population passes 11 billion in the 22nd century. ). Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may consult my e-book Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 662p (2016). All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B. Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX Suicide by Democracy: an Obituary for America and the World (2018) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQVWV9C
Numerous environmental theorists characterize human population growth as an unsustainable pandemic accountable for a variety of ecological problems. However, regional consumption patterns amplify the environmental impact of a population, making the two factors (consumption and population) difficult to evaluate separately. Many environmentalists advocate for wider distribution of family planning services, contraception, and sexual education to prevent population growth. Meanwhile, some rights advocates insist that population growth is the symptom of larger cultural injustices and that contraceptives are inappropriate tools to address these underlying inequities.
Climate Change Denial and Public Relations, Almiron and Xifra (eds), Routledge, 2019
In the mid-1990s, elements of the social justice movement joined growthists and religious conservatives in a veritable Greek chorus of opposition to the problematisation of population growth. This unlikely alliance was highly successful in mainstreaming population denialism as well as turning overpopulation into a taboo subject, especially in the West. In the quarter-century since, natural scientists, environmentalists, demographers, journalists and policy-makers have systematically avoided problematising population growth, with grave consequences to public awareness and debate as well as to interdisciplinary experts' ability to properly diagnose the causes of and most effective remedies for climate change and a plethora of other creeping catastrophes. In this chapter I trace the ideological roots of population denialism and the taboo to age-old growthist ideation in combination with the shaming discourse and idealised expectations of human behaviour from late-18 th-century utopian thought. The problem of overpopulation has become vastly worse over the last 200 years or so, but the rhetorical strategies for dismissing and shutting down discussion on the issue have hardly changed.
“A day is sure to come when human beings will make test-tube babes in laboratories. When this practice is widespread, nature will snatch away the reproductive or generative power from men and women, in the same way as physical changes have evolved in human beings from the original form of Australopithecus. It is interesting to discuss the coming days of human civilization when the reproductive powers of humanity will be seized and babies will be produced in laboratories,” There will be two kinds of laboratory babies – mechanical and biological, according to Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar. What sounds like science fiction today may become the reality of tomorrow. P. R. Sarkar, (1921-1990), was a spiritual teacher (also known as Shrii Shrii Anandamurti) and social philosopher, who propounded PROUT (Progressive Utilization Theory) and founded the socio-spiritual movement Ananda Marga (“the Path of Bliss”). – Richard Gauthier, Department of Chemistry and Physics, Santa Rosa Junior College, Santa Rosa, California, USA, April 28, 2021.
The Jakarta Post, 2014
In the heightened enthusiasm for family planning and especially LAPMs, sexual and reproductive health seems to be left out. The operationalization of “voluntary family planning” and “informed choice” may also need close monitoring to ensure that Beyond ICPD 2014 family planning efforts finally empower women — and do not fall back into the temptation of the past population control paradigms
Research in population and development in the past decade has increasingly centered on examining the relationship between health and demographic vital eventsfertility, mortality, nuptiality, and migration. Anthropological Demography of Health is a landmark volume that gives a new currency to this debate. First, the editors' careful and detailed Introduction and Afterword urge the reader to consider more seriously the local variations and heterogeneities in demographic and health behaviour. The questions of what subpopulations compose the demographic and health patterns leading to heterogeneities on the subnational level are put at center stage in the volume. Second, each of the 19 context-specific chapters offer a wealth of perspectives and methodologies to examine these subnational variations in demographic and health behaviors, as well as their governance across contexts in the global North and global South. Third, we learn from this edited collection as much about variations in health vulnerabilities and inequalities between and within subpopulations as we do about individual and community resilience and risk mitigation strategies. These are all crucial, yet challenging aspects developed by this edited collection, which make it the first contribution of its scope and ambition. In this review, I take the three aforementioned aspects as my primary focal points as I guide the readers through the volume's main highlights. Anthropological Demography of Health stands in line with the classical edited collections that have laid out this field since the 1990s. 1 The Introduction surveys this rich history. Read alongside the Afterword, the two review chapters illustrate why the disciplines of demography-with its focus on vital events-and anthropologywith its focus on rites of passage-did not recognize their common interest in the study of biological and social facts of life until the 1980s. As the Introduction to this collection vividly shows, the dominance of modernization theory in the postwar decades created more synergies between demography and sociology/economics. Nonetheless, the critique of demographic models that undermine variations promoted more careful examination of demographic behaviors on a local scale. Inspired by 1960s and 1970s studies in historical demography, anthropological demography emerged when the shift in the study of reproductive behaviors took place. Separate from the postmodern turn in social sciences, this shift started with the study of reproductive behaviors beyond a mere focus on fertility limitation, and accounting for a wider set of health-seeking behaviors and structural factors that shaped these behaviors on a local level. As this volume illustrates, anthropological demography has indeed urged an inquiry into a systematic study of subnational variations in demographic behaviors through innovative bottom-up qualitative and qualitative approaches. Anthropological Demography of Health builds on this important legacy by taking it a major step forward. The collection presents a convincing case for why
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