The Global Politics of Census Taking Quantifying Populations, Institutional Autonomy, Innovation

"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