Development and Change

The population bomb.

The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries

This article explores how time interacts forcefully with the experience of living within toxic spaces. Through ethnographic research and interviews with residents of a contaminated town in Louisiana, the article unpacks the uncertain temporalities of industrial pollution and potential means of resistance. Putting Mbembe's (2003) postcolonial treatise on necropolitics in conversation with Nixon's (2011) work on slow violence, the article examines the racialized, uneven, and attritional experience of petrochemical pollution in a former plantation landscape. By exploring the necropolitics of place, the article reveals how unjust exposure to toxic chemicals creates contemporary “death-worlds” that are experienced in temporally uncertain and constricting ways. The oppressive nature of uncertain temporality makes the material assemblages of petrochemical infrastructure daily environmental concerns. Yet by focusing on the lived experience of communities inhabiting this toxic geography, the article notes how witn...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/24694452.2018.1470924

Toxic Space and Time: Slow Violence, Necropolitics, and Petrochemical Pollution

Attention to the urban and metropolitan growth of nature can no longer be denied. Nor can the intense scrutiny of racialized, postcolonial and indigenous perspectives on the press and pulse of unev...

Urban political ecology II The abolitionist century

Hegemonic narratives and practices around environmental change, even when coming from concerned and seemingly progressive fronts, often contribute to a larger project of population control. The Mal...

Malthus’s specter and the anthropocene

In this essay we put forth nested arguments about the way that racialization remains a powerful force in contemporary society, contending that intersections with space and nature offer important lessons about the (de)construction of race. We argue that the pernicious character traits of racial constructs develop through spatial practices and intersect with ideas about “nature” and belonging. We trace these concepts through recent conversations in geography and environmental studies, and we call for a persistent, critical, and prominent engagement with racialization in the spatial social sciences. Finally, we introduce the papers that constitute this symposium, which engages these questions from a range of perspectives and across a variety of landscapes. We hope to spur the conversation about “race and geography”, broadly conceived, beyond studies conceptualized around race alone. We are hopeful that this work, and the larger body of work it contributes to, travels beyond academic conversations to engage broader social justice debates about the “nature” of racial inequality—to ultimately participate in its dismantlement.

Race, space, and nature: An introduction and critique

Following the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 in Cairo, which prompted a discursive shift from population control to reproductive health and rights in international d...

A feminist exploration of ‘populationism’: engaging contemporary forms of population control

In Making Sexual Stewards, Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. With an increasing focus on climate change coming to dominate news media and international development circles, population advocates have harnessed an opportunity to reframe population growth as an urgent source of climate crisis, and a unique opportunity to support women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) via funding international family planning policy. Making Sexual Stewards follows the network through a diverse range of sites—from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference—to investigate how the new population advocacy is constructed and circulated, while drawing on longstanding development narratives linking population growth to environmental scarcity and geopolitical instability. Sasser argues that this advocacy revolves around framing the sexual steward: a neoliberal development subject sitting at the nexus of discourses linking scientific knowledge production, creative donor advocacy, and youthful advocacy focused on global social justice.

On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change

Environmentalists and environmental organizations in the USA have long identified population growth as a key threat to environmental sustainability at local and global scales. The neo-Malthusian logics they invoke embed racialized images and categories in defining population “problems”, yet increasingly social justice language is invoked in population debates as a “solution” in the context of international development. This article explores the historical and contemporary characterizations of race as a central component of population–environment advocacy. It focuses on locations of race narratives in both the conceptualizations of population growth as an environmental problem, and family planning as a global solution. Through a critical analysis of the “population justice” framework, I argue that new discursive approaches attempt to reposition population work as socially just, while eliding critical analyses of race.

Jade S. Sasser

Papers

Malthus’s specter and the anthropocene

Race, space, and nature: An introduction and critique

A feminist exploration of ‘populationism’: engaging contemporary forms of population control

On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change

From Darkness into Light: Race, Population, and Environmental Advocacy