IUSSP Scientific Panel on Historical Demography

Call for papers

International seminar on: Past and Present. Revisiting the Demographic Transitions in the South through Individual Longitudinal Data

Mumbai, India, 17-19 January 2013

Online Submissions

Organized by:
the IUSSP Scientific Panel on Historical Demography and International Institute for Populations Studies (IIPS), Mumbai

Demographic transition is a worldwide process with a high heterogeneity according to the wealth of nations, socioeconomic status, cultural background, human and social capital, and so on. Moving to the South, in Mumbai, India, the IUSSP Panel on Historical Demography proposes a walk from the present to the past through an exploration of individual and family histories. Indeed, the demography of developing countries was and still remains the demography of growing masses of populations. Nevertheless, during the last decades new approaches have emerged using individual longitudinal data, which take into account living contexts. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers to explain the recent history of demographic research in the South, the conditions in which new forms of data collection at micro level have appeared, their development and appropriation at a national/regional level, as well as the heuristic challenges in analysis and cross-cultural comparisons. Last but not least, the aim is also to show how these data change our understanding of the demographic transitions. The main focus will be on Asian and African countries but researchers who are working on other regions are welcome.

The seminar will address four main topics:
The first general topic will address the relatively recent but rich history of individual/family longitudinal data collection. World Fertility Surveys, Demographic Health Surveys, or the triple biographies, etc. provide considerable longitudinal retrospective data. Prospective panel data, even though they are more recent and focus more on local than national level, remain rare. Mixed methods also seem to speak in local scale and are associated with a greater concern about the contextual effects. When, who, why those research designs appeared, and to cope with which research challenges?
The next issue is how those data changed and are changing our understanding of the past and ongoing reproductive transitions, including their embeddedness in socioeconomic and sociocultural dynamics? What place for migrations in this web of interactions? We propose to revisit the history – including the contemporary one – of fertility/reproduction from an individual life course perspective:

of women/mothers
of men/fathers
of children/sibling groups.

Those three perspectives will be our second, third and fourth topics.

The first two days of the seminar will be devoted to presentations of papers on the theme of this call for papers. The third day will consist of a dialogue between Indian and international scholars.

Seminar organizers seek papers which propose syntheses or innovative approaches on the research agenda described above and mainly papers that focus on populations in the South. However, we will be pleased to include researchers from the North who are “filling the gap” between the past and the present. In the same way, we will be glad to include researchers working on collection of nominal individual data, or trough secondary analyses of contemporary materials like many recent surveys including retrospective life courses or family histories.

Researchers interested in presenting their work at the seminar are invited to submit a proposal on the IUSSP website by 30 July 2012. Submissions must include a short 200-words abstract and an extended abstract (2 to 4 pages, including tables) or a full paper.

Papers submitted should be unpublished. The Panel plans to publish a set of the papers presented at the seminar as a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal or in an edited volume.

Submission should be made by the author who will attend the seminar. If the paper is co-authored, please indicate the name(s) and affiliation(s) of co-author(s) at the end of the abstract.

The working language at the seminar will be English. Abstracts and final papers should therefore be submitted and presented in English.

Authors will be notified by 1 September 2012 on the acceptance of their paper. In the case of acceptance on the basis of an abstract, the completed paper must be uploaded on the IUSSP website by 15 December 2012.

No travel funding will be available for this seminar. Participants must seek their own funding to cover their travel. The meeting will take place in Mumbai, India, which is easy to reach by air. Local organizer will provide decent accommodation and will take care of local hospitality.

For additional information, please contact one of the following Panel members:
Faujdar Ram (fram@iips.net),
Michel Oris (Michel.Oris@unige.ch).