The journal invites submissions for the upcoming issue Counting Ourselves, which will be guest edited by Walter Bartl, Manuela Picq and Byron Villacís .

The deadline for submissions is 1st October 2026. 

Description

A few months into his second term, President Trump announced he would order a new census that excludes non-citizens. This unprecedented move in U.S. history threatened to erase millions of people from the map. It would reshape electoral outcomes, going against the 14th Amendment that requires counting all persons in each state to determine representation, and it could impact public policymaking by removing crucial data for infrastructure, health, or education. In preparation, the Trump administration officially terminated census advisory committees, notably those on racial and ethnic populations, and dismissed the independence of other official statistics as nonsense, accusing them of not getting the “right answer.” Indeed, censuses and public numbers speak.

The need to be counted, to be included in policy, and to have one’s voice heard is central to democracy. Benedict Anderson highlighted censuses as essential to imagined communities because they foster a sense of belonging, much like museums and maps do. They enable us to ask who we are and how we live, to understand our demographic diversity and commonalities, and to see ourselves as members of a community. Censuses are a civic exercise that involve all of us and should not be dismissed as merely a technical matter for bureaucrats.

Counting ourselves was always political. British colonizers invented the category of “scheduled tribes” as non-Aryan in population censuses that represented eugenic worldviews—and still define Indian society today. Populations of the favelas resisted the censuses in the early 20th century, distrustful of the Brazilian state and coercive taxes, shaping a collective memory that lingers on in popular culture. Yet when Bolivia’s government postponed its population census to influence electoral results in 2022, social protests erupted demanding the census execution.

Population numbers are ubiquitous: tourists use the number of inhabitants to get a rough orientation about the places they visit, companies estimate the (potential) market size based on population indicators, the media report on the latest demographic developments, and in politics demographic information is used for planning, funding formulas, and gerrymandering. While population numbers are typically taken for granted, their production and political use remain a black box most of the time.

Although population numbers are often treated as neutral, technical exercises, their production and use are deeply political processes that are frequently overlooked in democratic practice and demographic research. Censuses and their indicators are perceived as metrics: objective, valid, and reliable tools. Yet behind every statistical figure lies a set of assumptions, decisions, and practices that shape how people are seen, governed, and remembered. This proposed themed issue, Counting Ourselves, explores how population numbers shape the world—defining who counts, in what ways, and for what purposes.

There are now many ways of producing population numbers, from censuses to sample surveys to digital traces. Since the 19th century, censuses have been the most powerful and intimate exercises of modern statecraft, asking individuals to locate themselves within categories—never neutral—of race, ethnicity, gender, household, and more. The resulting indicators extend the reach of these classifications into policy and everyday life. They are used to allocate resources, monitor inequality, measure development, and evaluate progress toward goals such as those set out in the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. However, official statistics have recently come under pressure from the data provided by Big Tech companies, which is more timely and appears to serve similar purposes. The proposed special issue aims to analyze the production and use of population numbers to explore how these tools actually shape the very populations they claim to represent.

This themed issue invites scholars and practitioners across disciplines to examine population numbers as social artifacts that have a history and are embedded in a—sometimes very controversial—process. How are these tools imagined, conceptualized, and constructed? What political, cultural, and institutional assumptions do they carry? How do they circulate across institutions, media, and society? And how are they contested or reimagined by the very communities they seek to define?

By focusing on both the production and use of population numbers, the issue seeks to trace the full lifecycle of counting ourselves—from the initial design of categories and enumeration techniques to the translation of data into metrics that guide demographic analyses, policies, and representations. It pays particular attention to the ways in which these processes unfold in diverse historical and geographic contexts, and to the influence of international organizations and transnational statistical frameworks.

This issue is especially timely to foreground the 2030 censuses around the world in an era of increasing autocracy and reliance on data-driven governance. While the quantification of population dynamics has a long history, its contemporary expansion into nearly every domain of public life—from development aid to urban planning to environmental policy—raises urgent questions about accountability, transparency, and equity. This issue offers a much-needed space to reflect on what it means to count and to be counted in preparation for 2030. In doing so, it seeks to open a public discussion across borders to create space for inclusive, responsive, and reflective forms of counting ourselves.

Contributions may explore, among other topics:

• The social lives of population indicators and census categories: from institutional design to public reception and contestation.
• The symbolic, narrative, and affective dimensions of enumeration practices.
• The use of census data and indicators in defining membership, belonging, and exclusion—especially among racialized, migrant, and Indigenous populations.
• Historical and contemporary debates around classification systems and their implications for identity and representation.
• The role of statistical offices and professionals in negotiating political, bureaucratic, and public pressures.
• Comparative approaches to population measurement in the Global South and Global North.
• Conflicts and tensions between standardized indicators and other forms of knowing population (e.g., experiential, ethnographic, or local knowledge).
• How new technologies—such as digital enumeration or register-based systems—are reshaping census practices and the production of indicators.

Submission Guidelines 

Submissions should be written in accessible language for a wide readership across and beyond the humanities: see How to Write for Public Humanities. Articles will be peer reviewed for both content and style. Articles will appear digitally and open access in the journal. 

All submissions should be made through the Public Humanities online peer review system. Authors should consult the journal’s Author Instructions prior to submission. 

All authors will be required to declare any funding and/or competing interests upon submission. See the journal’s Publishing Ethics guidelines for more information.   

Contacts

Professor Byron Villacís - villacis@uoregon.edu

Questions regarding peer review can be sent to the Public Humanities inbox at publichumanities@cambridge.org.