ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how transitions in social and economic contexts during the 1980s and 1990s combined with philosophical developments within the social sciences and geography to drive forward existing population geography research agendas and spark new ones. Population geography contributed to the development of epidemiological transition theory. Clarke argued that natural disasters, like earthquakes and river-bank flooding, should be considered alongside public health interventions. While some explanations for the patterns of uneven growth returned to transition theory and its modernization hypothesis, mixed-method approaches evidenced a diversity of experiences that demanded explanations more sensitive to the linked cultural and economic transitions of globalization. Over the last two decades of the century, population geography thought of itself less as a field with a core agenda and a limited number of established approaches and more as a series of projects that addressed, in quite different ways, intersections between population and geography.