ABSTRACT
Taking into account the crucial importance of censuses as a source of information for the sustainable development goals of the global Agenda 2030, national public policies, and the politics of recognition, in the introduction to this book we set out to address the following research questions: How can we describe and explain the trajectory of national censuses? We broke this general research question down into three aspects, highlighting a factual, a social, and a temporal aspect: How can we explain the (non-) use of ethnoracial or religious questions in the census? How can the relative institutional autonomy of census taking be adequately described and explained? How can socio-material and methodological innovations of census taking be explained? Furthermore: What are the consequences of (particular forms of) census taking? The book certainly falls short of answering these questions in a comprehensive or even definitive way. Nevertheless, it is worth briefly summarizing the main results and conclusions that we can draw from the individual chapters of this book and point out avenues for further research.
