Full Description
This book examines in detail the state of the art on census taking to spark a more vivid debate on what some may see as a rather technical - and hence uncontroversial - field of inquiry.
Against the backdrop of controversy between instrumental and performative theoretical stances towards census taking, it analyses the historical trajectories and political implications of seemingly technical decisions made during the quantification process by focusing on the 2020 round of censuses, which have been particularly revealing as activities have been affected by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing containment policies. Through case studies of countries from the Global North and the Global South, the book highlights the consequences of, and innovations and challenges in census taking focusing on three particular areas of concern - the politics of the census in terms of identity politics; the institutional autonomy of the census; and significant and transformative methodological innovations.
This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of quantification studies, and social demography and more broadly to public policy, governance, comparative politics and the broader social sciences.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution‑Non Commercial‑No Derivatives (CC‑BY‑NC‑ND) 4.0 license.
Contents
The Global Politics of Census Taking in the 2020 Census Round: An introduction I. The Politics of Ethnoracial Categories 1. The Politics of a Datascape Transformed: Ethnoracial statistics in Brazil in regional comparative perspective 2. Census, Politics and the Construction of Identities in India 3. Education Censuses and Recognition: The Politics of Collecting and Using Data on Indigenous Students in Latin America II. The Politics of Institutional Autonomy 4. Population Census - Large Scale Project of a Public Statistics in Transition 5. Population Censuses in Crisis: United States, Brazil, and Ecuador in comparative perspective 6. The Latin American Observatory of Population Censuses: Increasing statistical literacy through an academia-civil society network 7. The Politics of Population Census, Socio-Economic Planning and Crisis of Underdevelopment in Nigeria 8. Censuses in Ukraine: not trusted and not needed? III. The Politics of Socio-Technical and Methodological Innovations 9. Establishing a Register-Based Census in Spain: Challenges and implications 10. Towards a Register-based Census in Germany: Objectives, requirements and challenges 11. Techno-political Transformation and Adaptability in Ghanaian Census History 12. Adoption of Smartphones for Data-Collection during the Fourth General Population and Housing Census of Cameroon: Motivations, opportunities and challenges. Conclusions and Desiderata for Further Research
