ABSTRACT
All societies need knowledge and all societies create knowledge. A relational ontology has transformed how social science knowledge is being made in a number of ways. As power, the ability to influence others, is key to social progress, knowledge production is carefully authorized. Three sets of Enlightenment beliefs shape the intellectual and political possibilities of population geography knowledge. The first belief is that knowledge is power. A second element of Enlightenment thinking held that, sooner or later, everything that was worth knowing could be known. A third Enlightenment perspective that informed the development of population geography argued that social and geographic setting belonged to the world of order and, as such, could eventually yield truth. Enlightenment beliefs in knowledge as power, authorization, objectivity, the worlds of order and disorder, progress and the nature of context have under pinned the development of geographical perspectives and shaped what intersections were and are now possible between geography and the study of populations.
