What’s so troubling about voluntary family planning anyway?

Nandagiri, R. (2021). What’s so troubling about ‘voluntary’family planning anyway? A feminist perspective. Population Studies, 75(sup1), 221-234. https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2021.1996623

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Demography and Population Studies as a discipline– technically, my PhD was linked with/tied to Demography but I always felt a little out of place, always wondering where my work sits, who it is in conversation with, and how it is received. While I have since carved out a bit of a niche for myself in “critical Demography” or “Qual Demography”, I worry about how my work interacts with the space. I still sit rather uncomfortably in the space.

However, my critiques and engagement must have some resonance as Professors Wendy Sigle, Alice Reid, & Rebecca Sear very kindly invited me to contribute to the Population Studies 75th anniversary issue.

There was a lot of back and forth on this piece, and I really struggled to articulate my arguments in a way that could be heard by those perhaps unfamiliar with some of the literature (Foucault! Discourse!) I was cited and utilising. Indeed, in the first workshop to discuss our articles, a senior Prof suggested that I might perhaps lose my intended audience due to how dense and unfamiliar some of the theories I utilised were.

One of the reviewers of my article remarked that much of the critique of demography has come from outside the discipline, and Prof Sigle urged me to think about being a ‘critical friend’ as I wrote this article (and took on board some pretty harsh reviews!). I love this concept of being a ‘critical friend’ and how to work with disciplinary tensions in a productive way.

It was not an easy article to write & there is a lot more I’d like to say (e.g., on race & racism, on demography’s understanding of itself, eugenics) but perhaps one day I will find a way to say it & it can be heard. I’ve presented this work a fair bit and have received pretty positive feedback (and some less than ideal feedback), so it seems to have hit a chord (or struck a nerve, depending on how you see it). Perhaps that’s part of being a critical friend too?