Population, Mobility and Belonging

Understanding Population Concepts in Media, Culture and Society

Rob Cover

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032088587
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429588778
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a world of increasing mobility and migration, population size and composition come under persistent scrutiny across public policy, public debate, and film and television. Drawing on media, cultural and social theory approaches, this book takes a fresh look at the concept of 'population' as a term that circulates outside the traditional disciplinary areas of demography, governance and statistics—a term that gives coherence to notions such as community, nation, the world and global humanity itself. It focuses on understanding how the concept of population governs ways of thinking about our own identities and forms of belonging at local, national and international levels; on the manner in which television genres fixate on depictions of overpopulation and underpopulation; on the emergence of questions of ethics of belonging and migration in relation to cities; on attitudes towards otherness; and on the use by an emergent 'alt-right' politics of population in 'forgotten people' concepts. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography and media and cultural studies with interests in questions of belonging, citizenship and population.

1 Introduction: population as a social, media and cultural concept

Introduction

At its very simplest, the term ‘population’ means a count of people in a given space: how many people populate an area, a city, a nation-state, the world. It is about counting. More than this, however, population is a socially constructed concept, an object of thought that plays different roles in everyday society and everyday life. Population is an idea that circulates in contemporary everyday culture and social discourse to describe a clustering of people who are countable, accountable, relatable and, often, recognisable. It regularly falls into the backdrop of our lives as something that is felt as being managed on our behalf by governments, such as counting in the right kinds of ways for planning infrastructure for future population growth. Sometimes it is encountered as simple fact, such as hearing with amazement that the global population will be x billion people by a certain date. Policy-makers and researchers working in, for example, health or education will use concepts of population daily in their work as part of the practice of planning for health needs or knowing where to build schools. Sometimes it becomes a point of contention and public debate, in political speeches in the lead-up to elections, for example, when various parties will attempt to capitalise on changes to the population, evoking anger among some of the electorate that there may be x number of people from Mexico living in the United States, or that a British middle-class population is doing less well being part of a European population, or that an existing racial or ethnic population is being, say, ‘swamped’ by another ethnic group of immigrants (Norman 2016). In these instances, the idea of population is repeated regularly in news, media and online commentary, at dinner, at parties, in classrooms, while members of that population are effectively invited to put forward an opinion on what that population should look like and how big it ought to be. And, often, just as suddenly, population drops again into the background of our everyday lives.

At the same time, in popular culture, film, television and science fiction literature, we often see population represented as a key narrative or topical issue: sometimes it is invoked to represent a dystopian future of an overpopulated earth; sometimes it is about interaction with other species that has changed what we have come to think of as the human population; and, popular today, sometimes it is to depict stories of radical depopulation of the planet. For example, the highly popular television series The Walking Dead, like other zombie apocalypse texts, tells stories set in a world in which very few members of the human population are left. Such stories are not merely about battling monstrous zombies, but deep and insightful reflections on what civilisation, subjectivity and identity might look like with only a tiny number of people left inhabiting the Earth. Not just the work of interesting, creative producers, such popular culture responds to deeply held interests and anxieties about human futures among contemporary audiences; it is therefore notable that stories about what it might be like to live in an overpopulated or underpopulated world circulate as part of a broad, everyday cultural concern—at least in popular culture if not in politics, policy and ethics. Such stories are part of the discursive picture for how we, as human subjects, migratory subjects and national subjects, and sometimes as minorities or identifying through other classifications or groupings, come to make sense of social relationships, relationality and belonging.

The concept of population as a node of belonging, however, is not the same as that other troublesome term ‘people’. We often use the word population as a synonym for people, of course. For example, when we use a phrase such as the ‘population of the school’ or the ‘LGBT population of New York city’ we may be talking in terms of the countable people who participate in a place, context or institution. However, we are often also talking about the kinds of mutual identifications through similitude that produce the idea of a people. Even so, such a phrase implies not only a countable number of people, but also practices of deciding who is counted and who is accounted for. The idea of a people, as Jacques Rancière (2016, p. 102) has noted, is always a figure constructed by the politicised act of privileging certain modes of grouping and belonging. These might include racial, national, nationalistic, the ‘deserving’, the descendants of founders, the obedient. Given the ways in which people as a concept is difficult to remove from the question of who?, population comes to be used as a different way of counting bodies—which means bodies present in a space, context, field, country or category. This, as we know from Giorgio Agamben (1995), means living subjects as zoë and not bios, animated flesh and not citizens. Due to the heavily politicised and complex possibilities that emerge when the concept of people is uttered, the term population is regularly used as a depoliticised term to help avoid the negative consequences that come up when we think about belonging to a people, a group, an ethnicity, a race or a nation. In doing so, however, the idea of the ‘countability’ of people is summoned forth, and this has become part of the array of governance, identity and belonging of contemporary life. Indeed, the term population is after all just as politicised as people, because, while it may not require the question who?, it does invoke other kinds of questions: Which? How many? Who is not to be counted? Where do they fit on a normative curve or distribution? Which bodies should live in this space? How will we decide which subjects receive what kind of health treatment? And so on.

Beyond demography

Just as the concept of a ‘people’ is constitutive of that which it names (Olson 2016, pp. 109–110), the idea of population also constitutes the object it purports to count, account for, measure, analyse or understand (and therefore claims to represent). One of the ways in which population is often apprehended is through demography. Demography is, literally, the study, measurement or description of people, although it is almost always a field of work and scholarship based on statistical measurement and analysis of populations, population groups, movements, trends and changes. As with other ‘sciences’, demography delimits the field of study and sets up experts who will speak about population and respond to questions about changes and forecasts using the specific language of demography that, itself, is a dialect recycled by governmental and administrative organisations to manage this object (the countable collection of subjects) in one set of ways rather than another. Instead of utilising demography or demographic data to understand population, this book takes population itself as a cultural artefact, seeing demography as one way that frames and interprets the concept of population, but not the only way and—indeed—very often a limitation. This is to ask what population is as a cultural artefact: the counted people and the accounting for people that governs belonging, that polices the borders and margins, that presents frameworks for deciding who will be deemed within a population, and just as often presents a way of thinking or articulating who is not to be included.

What demography does, however, is contribute to the role of population in forging identities. It does this through the way in which it presents statistics allowing for the representation of norms. Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens (2017) have cogently demonstrated that the knowledge framework for contemporary health emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe with the entry of statistics into medical clinics, helping shift focus away from clinical treatment to the broader medical health of whole populations. As greater quantities of data became available, there developed concepts that came out of a new focus on the health of populations: the average, the typical and the normal (Cryle and Stephens 2017, p. 17). This then inflected clinical practice with new knowledge frameworks that based assessment and treatment of patients within the practice of measurement against averages. The norm, which was not a popular or everyday concept prior to this, came to be the mechanism by which first the health of bodies and then the perception of behaviours, identifications and practices among subjects was measured. Demography as we know it today is the off-shoot of a practice of understanding averages and ratios in relation to large numbers, and the everyday concept of the norm is the emergent product of medical attention to population. In other words, demography and population health in their contemporary forms are good evidence of the power of historical concentration on populations to shape practices, forms of belonging, forms of exclusion, expressions of normality and ways of being today.

With persistent unfolding and reinvention of the concept of population and its measurement, the production of statistics, norms, ratios and averages, and the utilisation of this knowledge framework in ways that produce certain kinds of subjectivity and belonging, the everyday circulation of the concept of population is, then, central to how we understand our own identities. This occurs in a range of respects, most particularly through the perception of selfhood in relation to a ‘group’ of people populating a space (local, national, community, global). It also involves the perception of the self as an object that, to belong, must be compared with the norms, averages, distinctions, similarities and formations communicated through the science of population management and measurement. The self is thus always produced today as a response to being called upon to self-assess in order to ensure one has proximity to the norm and thereby belongs to or can be categorised within a population. The concept of population, however, is never merely a background, ‘naturalised’ idea or feeling but is always presented in the public sphere of everyday discourse and media entertainment through substantial anxieties, shifting attitudes, concerns, moral panics, fears and celebrations. These tend to focus on two separate but related frameworks through which population is depicted as a cultural artefact: population size and population composition.

Size matters

Population size refers here to the circulation of information about the overall numeric demography of groups of people, whether at the level of the nation or of the whole world. Indeed, concerns over the Earth’s carrying capacity—the extent to which the planet can sustain an ever-increasing population size over time—have been a topic of popular, heated debate from time to time, particularly in popular science writing, much of which drew on thinking from the late 1960s. Sources included the work of Garrett Hardin (1968) on the contemporary sustainability of shared resources of the ‘commons’, and the controversial book published the same year, The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich (1968). Such texts contributed substantially to the public imaginary about global population size and its implications and influenced much subsequent cultural, political and popular thinking about human futures in the context of population. This book addresses questions related to the disjuncture between official and entertainment discourse on population size and continued growth, theorising reasons why, for example, it appears so substantially in popular culture as an explanatory trope describing potential human futures, but is not raised seriously in the context today of policy debates related to the human contribution to carbon pollution and hence climate change. The interplay, then, between social understanding and policy is a significant topic of interest for making sense of the relationship between population and climate futures. The disjuncture is a nodal point in the fractured framework through which identity and belonging intersect with concepts of stability, history and futures.

A number of films as well as television series from the early 1970s focused on questions of overpopulation, making drama out of public anxieties about crowded urban spaces and their implications for living a liveable (and comfortable) life. These popular concerns over population size also contrast significantly with the administrative and global governance perspectives on population growth, which are constituted in an economics knowledge system supported by a foundational United Nations human rights statement that articulates childbirth and family size as matters for the family alone and not to be interfered with by governments. The People’s Republic of China’s one child policy was, of course, publicly derided in Western public discourse throughout the 1970s and 1980s, particularly as a means of stating that restrictions or controls on population growth are antithetical to Western, liberal–humanist and neoliberal cultures. It is notable that unchecked population growth or overpopulation is expressed principally in the creative arts rather than in policy debates, or in relation to increasing human-induced carbon pollution and its impact on ecology and climate. To some extent, this can be understood as a transferral of public anxiety into the ‘safer’ realm of film, television and other popular culture, rather than the more complex, risky and destabilising site of governance whereby intervention in population size would result in significant adjustments to the frameworks through which belonging is performed. At the same time, however, popular representations of underpopulation occur through a significant public interest in apocalyptic film and television, much of which depicts a human future in an era of civilisational collapse through the catastrophe of a sudden loss of population. Again, an attachment to population size is enacted through highly popular entertainment narratives, where social identity anxieties are expressed through the popular appeal of the genre of apocalyptic fiction, serving as a deflection from thinking about the implications of population size on ‘civilisation’, liveability and futurity.

Composition, counting and accountability

Parallel to population size discourse is a field of debate and interrogation of greater public prominence, that of concerns about the composition of discrete populations. Such debate is typically in relation to national population, which indicates a countable group of people inhabiting the physical (land) and conceptual (citizenship) space of a nation-state in ways that often feed back into questions of border policing around the concept of a people. Indeed, the category of the nation bears witness to some of the most heated social debates on the composition of a population, by which one means not just its countability but how it is counted, who will be counted and who will be accountable within that count, prescribing contexts of belonging. Much of the concern about Brexit in the United Kingdom, for example, has drawn on problematic and long-submerged fears about the loss of British identity in a European context, or have conflated European Union membership with questions about migration into Britain from elsewhere. That is, concerns are raised both tacitly and loudly about whether the British population has been subsumed into Europe, whether the objections to Brexit of the political leadership of Scotland would excise or divide the British population, how ancient questions of population belonging re-emerge, and what might happen to any perceptions of the Irish population should the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland require a customs and immigration border. Much of the discussion about Brexit in parliament and public opinion debate is about the pragmatics of major constitutional change, but underlying this is a deep-seated set of concerns about the identity of the population, and these are concerns that both instigated the push for a Brexit vote in the first place, and that remain points of apprehension and fretfulness as the process continues. The two questions of how the population will be composed and the extent to which subjects will find a rupture in their everyday sense of belonging operate as the central points of destabilisation that have been opened up by the Brexit phenomenon.

Questions about population composition are also invoked in the mercenary political campaigns of a number of outspoken, ultra-conservative politicians around the world. The political campaigns, for example, of Marine Le Pen in France over the past few years have advocated an alarming nationalistic perspective that rejects globalisation and delocalisation as stand-ins for an anti-immigration stance that looks to shore up the meaning of the French population and restrict who should be permitted to join it. Indeed, the chief concerns of questions related to the composition of national populations fixate on migration as that which changes not merely the size but the countable population as a composite of a people, with fears often expressed about how such change might affect the culture, form, style, tastes or self-perfection of that population. Such irrational but emotive fears for the consistency of population over time both draw on a mythical idea that the population’s composition has until recently been fixed into neat categories, races, bodies in appropriate places, and so on (it has always been fluid, of course), and that this composition is profoundly threatened, whether by increased mobility, globalisation of international trade, supranational political and economic organisations such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, and, obviously, migration and resettlement regimes.

While many of the public arguments in support of Donald Trump’s election pledge to build a wall between the United States and Mexico are articulated through oversimplified concerns about employment and access to benefits by non-residents, much of the underlying justification is based in attitudes against the movement of bodies that might upset a preconceived and mostly incorrect notion of what the United States population is or, at least, who deserves to be counted among it. Certainly, there is some truth to the point that the composition of population groupings is more fluid and less easy to be apprehended by those who wish for mythical clear-cut categorisations, and this is the result of the cultural force of mobility. Mobility, as John Urry (2007) has pointed out, is a marker of contemporaneity in contemporary society: ubiquitous, often desired, a structure of feeling that emerged in the last three decades of the twentieth century, and from which there is no turning back. Nevertheless, the generation of public concerns over the composition of a population and the politics about making it more exclusive are grounded in a very deep attachment, at the core of many subjects’ sense of being and well-being, to the mythical idea that earlier compositions of population were stable, as if mobility is something wholly new, and as if colonial and settler populations have been timelessly and ahistorically situated in the places that presently define them. Addressing that attachment at the level of the constitution of subjectivity itself is a necessary task in the obligatory and ethical mission of producing a less-exclusive and more-welcoming population that does not fall periodically into racialised sectionali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: population as a social, media and cultural concept
• PART I: Population, identity and governance in public debates and (inter)national policy
• PART II: Popular culture, population size and the composition of peoples
• PART III: Ethics for belonging to a population
• Index