ClassInfo

I have oriented this course around three key concepts - population, state, and nature - which deeply inform the subdiscipline of ‘population geography.' There are two goals: 1.) understand how the concept of population extends well beyond some impartial textbook definition of social life, and, in turn, 2.) uncover the historically specific techniques, customs, and practices for counting, classifying, and regulating people which this concept presupposes. Indeed, the binding of the terms of governance over real, living peoples to these statistical quantities we call populations is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is our task to understand how this association came about and for what purposes. As we will see, since its inception, the very concept of population has been indelibly linked to attempts made by modern states to mediate relations between people and nature.

Unit I consists of an historical investigation of the invention and study of populations. Now, while the general practice of counting people has been around for millennia, the purposes of doing so were quite limited until the modern era. It was the expropriation of the peasantry from the countryside in Europe - and their subsequent mass migration into cities - which led to a new motivation for the study of populations: solving the ‘problem' of ‘overpopulation'. In observing this movement at the end of the 18th-century, Thomas Malthus warned that England's population was expanding too quickly, impeding on the ‘natural' limits of its own agricultural productivity, and that, if left unchecked, this contradiction would lead the country into mass immiseration.

Accordingly, in Unit II, we will survey a number of ways in which ‘population' has become a problem which it takes a state to solve. We will focus on a specific phenomenon novel to capitalist society: so-called "surplus" populations. Derived from Karl Marx, this term refers to the persistence of a portion of the ‘free', expropriated population of laborers who do not produce enough value (read: make enough money) to exchange on the market for their own subsistence. Importantly, surplus populations are neither opposed nor merely external to capitalist society but integral to it, their study informing public policies which have not only helped guarantee the survival of surplus populations (e.g. through social welfare, entitlement programs) but, precisely in doing so, reproduce and rationalize their subjugation. As we will see the concept of "surplus population" is a useful tool for examining a number of contemporary population-related issues, well beyond Malthusian concerns for resource scarcity.

In Unit III, we will look more closely at the landscape of race, class, and conflict in the American Midwest. In particular, we will track the Great Migration(s) of Black Americans from the postbellum South in the early 1900s and into a very long century of legal and extralegal racial discrimination in the Midwest, from the 1919 Chicago race riots to the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Themes we will cover in this Unit are: public housing, urban renewal, policing, and racial capitalism.

Lastly, in Unit IV we will study population geography from a political ecological perspective. Here, we will return to the concept of nature, moving against Malthus by treating nature not as some static backdrop of human activity but as a dynamic, integral feature of social life. Although planetary climate change makes this point unavoidable, it has indeed always been the case that nature plays its own unique role in the shaping and study of population geography. In particular, we will investigate the connections between climate change, population health, and zoonotic spillovers like COVID-19. We will also consider the dynamic relations between race, nature, and capitalist development.

This course meets the Liberal Education requirements of Global Perspectives (was International Perspectives), Social Sciences, and Writing Intensive.