Abstract:Environmentalists and environmental organizations in the USA have long identified population growth as a key threat to environmental sustainability at local and global scales. The neo-Malthusian logics they invoke embed racialized images and categories in defining population "problems", yet increasingly social justice language is invoked in population debates as a "solution" in the context of international development. This article explores the historical and contemporary characterizations of race as a central… Show more
“…Feminist scholar Jade Sasser () analyses how prominent environmental advocates ascribe the abuses of population control to a ‘dark past’ to differentiate it from contemporary population policy, which they claim supports social justice and protects the environment. While these advocates still want to slow population growth, they see their efforts as distinctly different from the past.…”
Section: Rejection Of a ‘Dark Past’ With A Return To Targetsmentioning
In contrast to claims made by some, it is evident from recent, high‐profile family planning programmes that population control is not ‘history’, belonging to some troubled past. Rather, it persists in the troubled present alongside human rights and women's empowerment approaches. To make this argument, this article examines two family planning efforts which emerged from the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning: the ‘120 by 20’ target of Family Planning 2020 (FP2020), and the Implant Access Program (IAP). These examples illustrate population control practices in today's family planning programmes and highlight their serious implications. First, there are shortcomings in conceptualizing population control as largely in the past. Second, the ‘120 by 20’ and IAP examples suggest that FP2020 as a whole merits critical inquiry. Third, FP2020 raises issues of contraceptive safety regarding both the methods promoted and their mass dissemination. Finally, the claim that population control is history blocks productive re‐visioning of sexual and reproductive health and rights for all people as a development priority.
“…Feminist scholar Jade Sasser () analyses how prominent environmental advocates ascribe the abuses of population control to a ‘dark past’ to differentiate it from contemporary population policy, which they claim supports social justice and protects the environment. While these advocates still want to slow population growth, they see their efforts as distinctly different from the past.…”
Section: Rejection Of a ‘Dark Past’ With A Return To Targetsmentioning
In contrast to claims made by some, it is evident from recent, high‐profile family planning programmes that population control is not ‘history’, belonging to some troubled past. Rather, it persists in the troubled present alongside human rights and women's empowerment approaches. To make this argument, this article examines two family planning efforts which emerged from the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning: the ‘120 by 20’ target of Family Planning 2020 (FP2020), and the Implant Access Program (IAP). These examples illustrate population control practices in today's family planning programmes and highlight their serious implications. First, there are shortcomings in conceptualizing population control as largely in the past. Second, the ‘120 by 20’ and IAP examples suggest that FP2020 as a whole merits critical inquiry. Third, FP2020 raises issues of contraceptive safety regarding both the methods promoted and their mass dissemination. Finally, the claim that population control is history blocks productive re‐visioning of sexual and reproductive health and rights for all people as a development priority.
“…Feminist scholars of color bring crucial attention to how the practices of targeting women's bodies for health interventions have unequally focused on brown and black bodies (Bridges ; Gutiérrez ; López ; Mullings and Wali ; Roberts ). In addition, scholars guided by reproductive and environmental justice paradigms expose how concepts of the environment are inextricable from race and reproduction (Sasser ).…”
The rapidly shifting field of epigenetics has expanded scientific understanding of how environmental conditions affect gene expression and development. This article focuses on two ongoing clinical trials-one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom-that have used epigenetics as the conceptual basis for testing the relationship between nutrition and obesity during pregnancy. Drawing on ethnographic research, I highlight the different ways that clinical scientists interpret epigenetics to target particular domains of the environment for prenatal intervention. Here I examine three environmental domains: the pregnant body, the home, and everyday experiences. In so doing, I show how different scientific approaches to epigenetics multiply concepts of "the environment," while also individualizing responsibility onto pregnant bodies. Ultimately, I argue that how the environment is conceptualized in epigenetics is both a scientific and a political project that opens up questions of reproductive responsibility.
“…In April 2013, both the national Sierra Club and 350.org released landmark statements of solidarity with the US immigrant justice community, remarkably departing from the discourses prevailing two decades earlier, in which neo‐Malthusian advocates for population control with a starkly racialized anti‐immigrant agenda nearly took over the national Sierra Club board in 1998 (Urban, ; King, ; Sasser, ). The statement by 350.org is characterized by global climate justice language, which is based on the view that immigrants driven to the US are victims of climate change and weather issues in their home countries:From working with our partners around the world, we know that migration itself is increasingly a climate issue.…”
Section: Variations Of Climate Justice: Uneven Global Frames and Scalmentioning
In October of 2012, youth organizers from the immigrant justice and climate change resistance movements in the southeastern US metropolitan region of Atlanta, Georgia, coordinated a direct action tactic framed by a unified narrative justifying collaboration between immigrant and climate justice activists on equal terms. In a continuing collaborative relationship, these organizers embraced mutually strategic narratives rooted in local civil rights history, but rejected common ‘global climate justice’ narratives used to frame social and environmental collaborative organizing. We examine the departure from ‘global climate justice’ narratives, which was exemplified by coalition building in Georgia, to argue that scholarship articulating ‘global climate justice’ as a new context for integrating social and environmental movements must anticipate barriers to these solidarities, especially historical, regional and racialized dynamics of power among organizations engaged in these developing alliances. Based on an investigation of strategic alliances between anti‐racist, immigrant justice organizers and climate change activists in the metropolitan areas of Atlanta and Athens, Georgia, we argue that climate justice narratives in both activism and scholarship would benefit from more attention to the particular political and cultural geographies in which diverse forms of climate justice organizing can take hold.
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