Making up People: Classification and Quantification in the Population Census. Part II

Population censuses have become part of the indispensable epistemic infrastructure of modern statehood and seem to be equally indispensable for holding governments accountable through analysis and critique when they fail to deliver on their declared public policy aims. The relevance of population data has become especially visible during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to monitor the spread of the pandemic itself but also in order to devise measures of containment. While national statistical systems have been designed more and more systematically also because the United Nations have promoted population censuses and systems of vital statistics worldwide since the 1950s, the production of population indicators is by far not a global model that travels without translation. Some states have never managed to implement a consistent system of population statistics leading to various problems of invisibility and exclusion for vulnerable groups. In other cases, new forms of data gathering are replacing or transforming traditional data sources. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has hampered the global census round in many countries. How were the challenges posed by the pandemic met by national statistical offices? How did problems of data gathering due to the pandemic affect containment policies? We welcome conceptual and empirical papers that address one or more of these issues.