Heterogeneity of demographic behaviour in contemporary societies: individualization, variability, and inequalities (1800-2000)

This collective work looks at the ways population is shaped, over the life course, by law, public policies, science, and various institutions. The aim is to dissect, and requalify, the dominant view from contemporary demographic history elaborated around “great transformations”, that promote a monolithic, linear reading of demographic phenomena. In so doing, it tends to obscure the vast diversity of these phenomena. For instance, the important variations in fertility, during and after the transition, demonstrates the need to confront different approaches in order to move away from reductive theories with little explanatory power. The researchers involved in this project have set themselves the objective of studying the inequalities linked to these changes, by inscribing them in the individual life course, but also in the long course of successive generations.