Sustainability and Social Justice

Confronting Populationism: Feminist Challenges to Population Control in an Era of Climate Change

Document Type

Article

Abstract

In this themed section, we identify three forms of populationism and bring them into conversation, which allows us to mount feminist challenges to present day forms of population control. These interventions are timely and necessary because of the continued prevalence of population control ideology and population alarmism in sustainable development and climate change policy and programs. We issue a direct challenge to scholarship that links population reduction with climate change adaptation and mitigation and the survival of the planet. The introduction provides an overview of our key argument, that seemingly disparate phenomena—technocratic approaches to fertility control, climate change securitization, Zika assemblages, neo-Malthusian articulations of the Anthropocene, and ‘climate-smart’ agriculture—are entangled with and expressions of demo, geo and biopopulationisms. We employ feminist critiques to contest these manifestations of population control that restrict bodies, reinforce boundaries, and create spaces of exclusion and violence.

Publication Title

Gender, Place and Culture

Publication Date

3-3-2020

Volume

27

Issue

3

First Page

307

Last Page

315

ISSN

0966-369X

DOI

10.1080/0966369X.2019.1639634

Keywords

biopopulationism, demopopulationism, geopopulationism, population control, populationism

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