Navigating Time and Space in Population Studies

Navigating Time and Space in Population Studies presents innovative approaches to long-standing questions about the diffusion of population and demographic behavior across space and over time. This collection utilizes newly-available historical data along with spatially and temporally explicit analytical methods to evaluate and refine core demographic theories and to pose new questions about mortality and fertility transitions, migration, urbanization, and social inequality. It adds a spatial dimension to the analysis of temporal processes and a temporal element to spatial processes. Chapters cover a broad range of geographical settings, including the United States, Europe, Latin America, and the Islamic world, and span time periods from the eighteenth to twentieth century. Contributors from a variety of disciplines reveal the complexity of factors involved in population processes that spread across space and unfold over time, and demonstrate a rich set of tools with which to explore, analyze, and test the spatial and temporal dynamics of these phenomena. The theories, methods, and substantive findings presented here provide new lenses through which to view time and space in population studies, offering useful models and valuable insights to demographers and other social scientists exploring both historical and contemporary questions about population dynamics anywhere in the world.