Population Politics

Lecture 1: Querying Population Geography & Introduction to Population Geography

Agenda:
 Opening discussions: population problems
 Module walk-through
 Brief history of population geography
 Population pyramids

‘Population problems’
 Think of an example of a population problem
 What makes it a problem of population?
 How would you study this problem? What theories and methods would be involved?

Module aims:
 In-depth analysis of politics of population
 Examine how populations have been conceptualised and governed.
 Learn how politics of population knot together ecological concepts, gender relations, international
geopolitics.
 Background in feminist geography, political geography, environmental politics will benefit

Learning Outcomes:
 On completion – expected to:
o Understand the social construction of ‘population’ as a tool and object of governance
o Critically engage with a range of contemporary and historical issues to which population
politics are central
o Evaluate the roles of race, gender, and sexuality in shaping various population issues
o Analyse population politics through different theoretical lenses
o Compare and evaluate different policies and political positions regarding population
o Critically engage with geographical scholarship on population and identify how a
geographical approach to the topic may advance understandings of the stakes of population
politics

Key skills:
 Demonstrate the ability to synthesize and integrate knowledge and apply it to contemporary issues
 Demonstrate ability to make arguments and communicate complex knowledge in different formats
and styles
 Demonstrate critical reflection and understanding of competing arguments and positions

Themes this term:

 Querying Population Geography
 Representing Population
 Overpopulation from Malthus to Planetary Boundaries
 Climate crisis and Politics of Reproduction
 Surplus Population
 Covid-19/ Ageing Populations
 Politics of Population control
 Development, family planning and Women’s empowerment
 Queer Futurity and Reproduction
 Against Population
ASSESSMENT

 ‘Op-ed’ essay: 25%. Due 26 Feb

 ’Phantasmagram’ coursework essay: 75%. Due 29 April

POPULATION GEOGRAPHY

A Case for Population Geography

 “Population is the point of reference from which all the other elements are observed and from
which they all, singly and collectively, derive significance and meaning. It is population which
furnishes the focus” (Trewartha 1953, p. 83)

Trewartha’s view of geography

Spatial Demography
 Recall: Geography’s quantitative revolution
 Traditional axes of demographic analysis: time and age
 Spatial analysis of demographic processes
o The study of how populations and their compositional structures change and interact across
space
 Models frequently have predictive functions
 Driven by explosion of spatial data and forms of digital analysis
 Emergence of main demographic areas of focus: fertility, morbidity, migration

(Re)theorizing population geography

 Is population geography too empirical? Or too theoretical?
 Commitment to empiricism
o “The notion that the data, if properly analysed, will tell their own story remains more
prevalent in our subdiscipline than in most other areas of human geography” (Graham and
Boyle 2001, p.390)
 Attention to difference vs ‘grand narratives’
 Recall postcolonial analyses of the politics of theory
 Levels of theory
o “Judgements about the appropriateness of the theory must, by their very nature, depend
upon interpretations of the empirical evidence” (Graham 2000, p. 261).
 What can population geography contribute to social theory?
 Politics of position
Political demography?
 Robbins and Smith (2017) call for “a more vigorous engagement of critical human geography with
issues of demographic change, but one that is explicitly and self-reflexively political” (p. 200)
 Why have critical geographers been reluctant to engage?
o Avoidance of demographic-driven explanations for change
o Legacies of Malthusianism
 The politics of demographic knowledge
o “There is a close relationship between observations of births, deaths and fertility and
normative urges to govern these same things: population research is political research”
(Robbins and Smith 2017, p. 212)
 “Demographic change demands a productive engagement with critical inquiry, a host of methods,
and a wide range of theory in current human geography” (Robbins and Smith 2017, p. 212)

Qualitative methods for population geography

 After Geography’s ‘cultural turn’
 Interviews, life stories others
 Mixed methods approaches.

What is Population?

Aggregate life
 How is life counted?
 How are lives grouped together to make populations?
 What are the effects of aggregating life?
 What are the temporalities of aggregate life?
 What are the spatialities of aggregate life?
 How is aggregate life governed?
 How is aggregate life known?

What is Population?
 Michel Foucault – Security, territory, population
 Foucault: population is “level that is pertinent for the government’s economic-political action” (42).
 Individuals function “simply as the instrument, relay, or condition for obtaining something at the
level of the population” (42).
 The population is both the object of governance (that to which governance is directed) and the
subject, called upon to act in certain ways.

Foucault on population
 For Foucault, ‘population’ appears natural, but is not a natural category, it is an object of
governance
o The idea of a population is really developed in the second half of the 1700s (note: around
the time of Malthus)
 Contrast to the population: ‘the people,’
o It is the ‘people’ who can resist being governed
o “The people comprise those who conduct themselves in relation to the management of the
population, at the level of the population, as if they were not part of the population as a
collective subject-object, as if they put themselves outside of it, and consequently the
people are those who, refusing to be the population, disrupt the system” (43-44).
Population and biopolitics
 Biopolitics: “the right to make live and let die” (Foucault, 1978 [2001], p.241)
 In contrast to sovereign power (though often the two operate in tandem)
 Government through the regulation of life processes
 The population becomes the object of governance
 ‘Protection’ of the population means non-normative people are cast out, ‘let die’

Foucault on the governance of populations

 'Populations’ are governed by the management of a set of processes
o This appears as technical rather than juridical – often these practices appear ‘positive’ or
productive rather than disciplinary
 Population emerges as the problem of institutions of governance
o Initially in Foucault’s analysis: medical and disciplinary
o Eventually: economic and political
o Sexuality ties the conduct of the individual to the nation
 The problem of population is posed by a number of knowledges: political/economic (Malthus and
Marx) but also biological (Darwin)
 Population dynamics are governed not simply through norms around gender, sexuality, ‘social
hygiene,’ but also urban planning, education, insurance, etc.
 Move to ‘governmentality’ rather than sovereign or disciplinary government
 Emergence of liberalism: interventions balanced with state withdraw, ideal of self-regulating subject
 Critical analysis of governmentality: what power relations lie behind “statistics, embodied urges,
and built forms”? (Legg 2005, p. 152)

Foucault on population
 ‘. . . population comes to appear above all else as the ultimate end of government. In contrast to
sovereignty, government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the
population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, and so
on; and the means the government uses to attain these ends are themselves all, in some sense,
immanent to the population; it is the population itself on which government will act either directly,
through large-scale campaigns, or indirectly, through techniques that will make possible, without
the full awareness of the people, the stimulation of birth rates, the directing of the flow of
population into certain regions or activities, and so on.’

Critiques of Foucault
 His method: overreliance on periodization
 Neglect of colonies/ colonialism
 Underemphasis on racism

Necropolitics
 Biopolitics cannot fully explain how some populations are not just ‘left to die’ but actively exposed
to death
 Includes social and civil death
 Some populations are consigned to inhabit a subjectivity between life and death
 “Death and exposure to death are turned into productive ends” (Murphy 2017, p. 84)

Population and economy in the 21st century

Population and economy

 Murphy: how has the world been rearranged by particular understandings of population and
economy (and the connections between them)?
  Emerging out a particular historical moment: encounter between the Cold War and decolonization
 Postwar capitalism builds and emerges from population and economy

Population and economy

 How is population governed?
o Quantities and qualities
 Eugenics = (racial) quality
 Focus on population quantities also imbued with race
o “It offered a new way to move racist accounts of differential human evolution into an
economic rather than a hereditary biological register” (Murphy 2017, p. 11)

Key Concept: Reproduction

 The history of population governance “puts questions of reproduction at the center of how
capitalism summons its world” (Murphy 2017, p. 7)
 Feminist Marxists: reproduction should be afforded same valuation, attention, analysis as
production
 Demographers, etc.: reproduction is key variable
 What is reproduction? How do we theorise it?

Population as an experimental object

 Malthus: rates of production as stable
 Pearl and others: rates can be adjusted
 Notion of population as experimental object results in various institutions, projects, forms of
expertise, practices

Epistemic infrastructures of population

 Epistemic = how something is known
 Quantifications, interventions, experiments, research, expertise
 Infrastructural = knowledge-making is material
 “Buildings, bureaucracies, standards, forms, technologies, funding flows, affective orientations,
power relations” (Murphy 2017, p.6).

The economization of life

 “The practices that differentially value and govern life in terms of their ability to foster the macro-
economy of the nation-state, such as life’s ability to contribute to the gross domestic product (GDP)
of the nation” (Murphy 2017, p.6).
 Postwar/Cold War
 Historically specific: aimed at the national economy
 Reliant on post-colonial social science
 Population (birth and death rates) understood as adjustable through technologies and state policies
 Goal: optimization of population and economy

Life in aggregate
 Idea of population in the postwar era suggests that aggregate life is infinitely re-composable - a
’project’ in need of continuous intervention
 ‘Population’ becomes the figure of aggregate life, “points the finger at masses rather than
distributions and accumulations, at people rather than economy” (Murphy 2017, p.137)
 How else might aggregate life be imagined?
Temporalities of population
 “Individual lives are but a flicker”
 Interest in intergenerational trends, patterns, and trajectories
 Population as a modality through which the future is manifested

Studying population
 What is at stake in the concept or category of population?
 How is the concept of population used as a tool of governance?
 What can ‘population problems’ tell us about how change, politics, ethics, etc. are understood by
different actors?
 What does it mean to study population? What are the methods? What assumptions do they entail?
 What are alternative ways of thinking about the problems, affects, politics, and subjectivities that
get wrapped up in the notion of population?

Population Pyramids
Exploring demographic models/data visualisations

Questions to consider
 What general shape does the pyramid have?
o Do you think that overall the population is growing, shrinking, or staying the same?
o Is the overall shape the same for male and female? What differences do you notice? What
might explain those differences?
 What irregularities do the pyramids have?
o Are there any strange bumps or gaps?
o When did they occur? Did they affect men and women equally?
o What are some possible explanations for the irregularities?
o Can you trace outlying cohorts through the pyramids over time?
 What country do you think your pyramids represent? Why?
 How do you think that the pyramids for 2050 were made?
Phantasmagrams of population
 A way of understanding the politics of demographic knowledge
 Michelle Murphy: phantasmagrams as ‘quantitative practices that are enriched with affect,
propagate imaginaries, lure feeling, and hence have supernatural effects in surplus of their rational
precepts’
 Against a view of quantitative models as rational and objective

Population pyramids as phantasmagrams

 How do you think population pyramids are made and used? By whom and for what purpose?
 What affects might population pyramids summon?
 What do population pyramids miss, occlude, or not show?
 What imaginaries does your group’s population pyramid propagate? What futures does it lead us to
imagine?

Next week…
 Overpopulation: from Malthus to Planetary Boundaries
o The long tentacles of theories of overpopulation and environmental degradation
o Querying the relationship between population and environment
o Considering ideas of environmental limits