Contributions now invited for the Populating the 1980s: A Decade Revisited edited volume. Contact a.sarcar@unsw.edu.au for more information.
About:
For global negotiations over the population, the 1980s was a bridging decade. In the 1970s, population control through “family planning” as a development aid program boomed and waned. In the 1990s, the rhetoric of human and environmental rights was fully embedded in the policy discussion of the global population trend. What, then, marked the 1980s in terms of the global, regional, national, and local level discussions on population? Were there population practices specific to the decade? Was the 1980s really a bridging decade or can we characterize it in alternative ways? What insights would the perspective on the 1980s bring to the historiography? Populating the 1980s: A Decade Revisited aims to engage with these questions.
In addition to this, Populating the 1980s aims to address the lacunae created by the existing scholarship. Historians know much about population politics until the 1980s. Social scientific work has dominated the relevant scholarship since. Through Populating the 1980s we also aim to “populate” the historiography of this understudied period.
We are seeking contributors to Populating the 1980s: A Decade Revisited. We invite proposals that engage with historical scholarship on population politics and with topics including but not limited to:
- Family planning in primary health, in particular maternal and child health
- Eugenics and/or population quality
- Population quantity and mobility
- Feminist engagement with population politics
- The pro-life vs pro-choice politics
- Neoliberalisation
- Reproductive technologies
- Environment, resource, and population
- Fertility decline
- China’s one-child policy
- The 1984 United Nations International Conference on Population in Mexico City
Please submit paper proposals which include: a title, abstract (300 words maximum), and a short CV (150 words maximum) to Aprajita Sarcar (a.sarcar@unsw.edu.au) by March 5th, 2024.