Empower Women, Save the Planet? Science, Strategy, and Population-Environment Advocacy

This dissertation is about the problems of global population and women's fertility as constructed, circulated and contested among a network of American environmental actors. The first decade of the new millennium witnessed an upsurge in environmentalist attention to population trends, particularly in the context of widespread attention to climate change. Using ethnographic research conducted among a network of U.S. foreign aid donors, environmental, population and family planning NGO managers, and college youth activists, this dissertation asks the questions: What- and who- is driving the renewed focus on population growth as a driver of ecological crisis? What strategies are being used to drive a linked population-environment development agenda forward, and what effects do these strategies have on population science, policy, and political debates? I argue that, rather than reprise familiar neo-Malthusian arguments, these actors draw on scientific knowledge and social justice frameworks, to position population-environment advocacy in the realm of progressive politics. At the same time, population advocates increasingly enroll young activists as the newest cadre of international population advocates, through contradictory and contentious approaches to framings of race, gender and justice politics. This multi-sited project is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on conceptual approaches from the fields of political ecology, science and technology studies and medical anthropology to interrogate questions the uses of scientific knowledge production, political messaging, and racialized and gendered body politics in international population-environment advocacy. In chapter 2, I explore the historical processes of articulation which have come together and fractured apart at particular historical conjunctural moments. It focuses on how the population `problem' and its potential solutions have been constructed scientifically and politically over time, crystallizing in the 20th century as hegemonic paradigms within international development. Chapter 3 centers on the micropractices through which college youth are trained in population-environment messaging and other advocacy strategies, focused on the strategic use of social justice discourses, technology-based advocacy, and selective use of ecological and climate science data. In this chapter, I argue that these practices are constitutive of the process of making development actors from afar. Chapter 4 analyzes the changing role of racial politics in population-environment advocacy over time, charting the ways race has moved from a zone of heated controversy to providing an opening for new representational strategies. In chapter 5, I explore the behind the scenes role of private donors whose creative financing of population projects manifests over time as a powerful form of advocacy. Chapter 6 focuses on recent developments in scientific knowledge linking population growth with climate change, arguing that the projections these data represent are productive of both novel forms of thinking about the future, as well as anticipatory interventions that help shape it. The conclusion explores the possible futures of population-environment advocacy, raising questions about the transformative potential of transnational youth organizing predicated on a radical rupture from the past

Giving What to Whom? Thoughts on Feminist Knowledge Production

This research note is part of the thematic section, Limits to Giving Back, in the special issue titled “Giving Back in Field Research,” published as Volume 10, Issue 2 in the Journal of Research Practice

The Limits to Giving Back

In this thematic section, authors consider the limitations on giving back that they faced in field research, or saw others face. For some authors, their attempts at giving back were severely limited by the scope of their projects, or their understandings of local cultures or histories. For others, very specific circumstances and historical interventions of foreigners in certain places can limit how and to what extent a researcher is able to have a reciprocal relationship with the participating community. Some authors, by virtue of their lesser positions of power relative to those that they were studying, simply decided not to give back to those communities. In each article it becomes apparent that how and in what ways people give back is unique (and limited) both to their personal values and the contexts in which they do research

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

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

A Feminist Exploration of ‘Populationism’: Engaging Contemporary Forms of Population Control

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 development, policy experts and scholars have relegated population control to the realm of history. This presents a unique challenge to feminist critics who seek to identify manifestations of population control in the present. In this article, we consider the potential of ‘populationism’ as terminology that may assist in clarifying varied new manifestations of population control. We explicate three interrelated populationist strategies that focus on optimizing numbers (demo), spaces (geo), and life itself (bio). Through our elaboration of these three populationisms and their interaction, we seek to inspire feminist, intersectional responses to the pernicious social, economic and environmental problems that technocratic populationist interventions obscure

What is Health? Panel Presentation

LMU faculty members Carla Bittel, Jade Sasser, Hawley Almstedt and Sister Jayne Helmlinger from the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange discussed how health is defined, studied, and analyzed according to their respective fields and experiences. Carla Bittel, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of History at LMU, specializes in nineteenth-century United States history. Her research focuses on gender issues in the history of medicine and science and examines the history of women\u27s health, women physicians, and the role of science in medicine. Her newest research endeavors explore gender and phrenology in antebellum America. Jade Sasser, Ph.D. is a faculty member in the Department of Women\u27s Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Her work focuses on research of population and environment, demography, climate change, family planning, international development, gender, race, medical anthropology, political ecology, science and technology studies in the United States and Africa. Hawley Almstedt, Ph.D., R.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Health and Human Sciences at LMU, has research expertise in studying the development of peak bone mass and its role in the prevention of osteoporosis. As an exercise physiologist and registered dietitian, she also examines the general benefits of physical activity, exercise program design, and the health benefits of vitamin D. Sr. Jayne Helmlinger, CSJ, is the General Superior of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange. Sr. Jayne has 20 years of experience as a healthcare executive, with her most recent position as the Executive Vice President of Mission Integration for the St. Joseph Health in Orange, California. She has also served as a Board of Trustee member at both the local and system levels within St. Joseph Health. Sr. Jayne has a Master\u27s of Science in Administration from the University of Notre Dame; and a Master\u27s of Arts in Health Care Mission from Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange were established in 1912. The Sisters are committed to education, including elementary, secondary, university and other adult education. They also work in acute care hospitals, rehabilitation programs, home health care, community education, primary care clinics, wellness programs, as well as services for immigrants, the homeless and the hungry. It is with great joy that, in their Jubilee Year, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange have opened the CSJ Center for Reconciliation and Justice in collaboration with Loyola Marymount University. The CSJ Center offers a forum for dialogue, a place of education and a resource for reflective action, to promote unity among all persons and with God