Global Politics of Census Taking

Walter Bartl is Senior Lecturer of Sociology (Privatdozent) at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, and President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee 41, Sociology of Population.Christian Suter is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee 55, Social Indicators.Alberto Veira-Ramos is Professor of Demography and Population Theory at the Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain, Treasurer of International Sociological Association’s Research Committee 41, Sociology of Population, and Vice President of the Research Network on Economic Sociology of the European Sociological Association.

• The Global Politics of Census Taking in the 2020 Census Round: An introduction I. The Politics of Ethnoracial Categories 1. The Politics of a Datascape Transformed: Ethnoracial statistics in Brazil in regional comparative perspective 2. Census, Politics and the Construction of Identities in India 3. Education Censuses and Recognition: The Politics of Collecting and Using Data on Indigenous Students in Latin America II. The Politics of Institutional Autonomy 4. Population Census - Large Scale Project of a Public Statistics in Transition 5. Population Censuses in Crisis: United States, Brazil, and Ecuador in comparative perspective 6. The Latin American Observatory of Population Censuses: Increasing statistical literacy through an academia-civil society network 7. The Politics of Population Census, Socio-Economic Planning and Crisis of Underdevelopment in Nigeria 8. Censuses in Ukraine: not trusted and not needed? III. The Politics of Socio-Technical and Methodological Innovations 9. Establishing a Register-Based Census in Spain: Challenges and implications 10. Towards a Register-based Census in Germany: Objectives, requirements and challenges 11. Techno-political Transformation and Adaptability in Ghanaian Census History 12. Adoption of Smartphones for Data-Collection during the Fourth General Population and Housing Census of Cameroon: Motivations, opportunities and challenges. Conclusions and Desiderata for Further Research

"Nothing matches the reach of this volume! Learn what politicizes a census; produces questions on racial identities; expands the use of third party data. These insights instruct us in whether globalization of census-taking is in our reach, with far-reaching consequences."Kenneth Prewitt, Columbia University, New York; Director of the 2000 Census, USA "This truly international edited volume offers highly competent, nuanced, and empirically well-supported hypotheses to show how census making represents and enacts the classification of citizens; how it strives for autonomy while being part of politics and international standardization; and how the digitization of population registers might eventually make it superfluous."Richard Rottenburg, Wits University, Johannesburg"In an increasingly globalized and standardized production of numbers, this book offers an outstanding contribution to both a political epistemology as well as an institutional and methodological framing of census taking, making sense of what the state sees or avoids to see when counting its population."Patrick Simon, National Institute for Demographic Studies, Paris"...the perspectives considered by the book are valuable, not as models, but as trajectories that show possibilities and difficulties..." Book review by Da Silva, C. A. M., Oliveira, F. H. F. de, & Almeida, P. A. de (2024) in "Censuses in focus: recent transformations, sociopolitical issues, and methodological innovations", Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, 29(11) https://doi.org/10.1590/1413-812320242911.08072024EN