Demographic Data and Sociological Imagination
Language: English
Demographic data, through categories and enumeration, constitutes and reconstitutes social structure and social relationship. While it creates imagined communities and a sense of belonging, at the same time provides equally forceful basis of othering and exclusions. Sociologically, differential size, growth, composition and differential fertility, mortality and migration have been important factors shaping a sociological narrative and a political discourse. Demographic data provides a backdrop of evidence and knowledge shaping competition among social classes and political parties justifying policy making and programmes for electoral gains in a political system driven by number and majority rule. The sociology of demography starts with a bottom line of who counts for what political purpose. Who are included and who are excluded, why and how? Categories and classification, availability/non-availability data are important dimensions of what are hidden or revealed with strong sociological imaginations influencing social relationship, social cohesion and conflict. Demographic differentials in size and growth influenced by differential fertility, mortality and migration have set the political narrative shaping the interlinkages between social identity, politics and power. In return, state has shown enormous interest in bio-politics surrounding population issues.
The session aims to invite abstracts and papers from those who are interested in nature of demographic data, its definition, categorisation and counting leading to the sociological fall outs interlinked with political narratives in different parts of the world.