Doctoral Dissertation Research: Marine Conservation, Demography, and Family Planning

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Some efforts to manage natural resources have relied on family planning initiatives designed to address broader demographic concerns about population rise. This doctoral dissertation project examines how an understanding of overpopulation connects to efforts to slow fertility rates in vulnerable ecosystems, and what relationship the resulting family planning initiatives have with reproductive behavior.

This research project asks how environmental scientists and organizations understand and communicate the relationship between reproduction and conservation. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, findings will be disseminated to stakeholder organizations that shape the design and implementation of conservation programs. This project also broadens the participation of groups underrepresented in science.

This doctoral dissertation research project explores the relationship between family planning and environmental conservation policies aimed at addressing population concerns. Through an ethnographic study of demographers, marine scientists, family planning practitioners, and women participating in family planning, the project examines the processes underlying the production of population data, and the relationship these dynamics have to women’s own experiences and understandings of reproductive freedom.

Ultimately, this study contributes to new understandings of the ways in which demography and reproductive policy shape women’s reproductive lives. The methods include participant observation, semi-structured interviews and life history interviews with demographic scientists, community-based family planning practitioners, and women of reproductive age, as well as archival data analysis and supply chain mapping.

The project contributes to a growing scholarship on the environmental dimensions of reproduction, and advances scholarship in political ecology and science studies more broadly.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.