Identity Categories in Census Data.

A hundred years ago, the word "identity" was hardly part of our everyday vocabulary. Now personal identity has become a life project for most of us in the "Western" world.

In "For Whom the Bell Curves" we will focus on contentions over identity categories and how these contentions are reflected (or not) in population statistics. Tensions of categorization run between group and individual, and between internalized and externalized identities. Tensions concern distributions of social goods and burdens as well as assumptions about direction of causality.

Racial and ethnic categories will be our primary focus. These may be seen as representatives of a larger class of population categories -- including sex, gender, age, generation, nationality, and class -- where 1) there are tensions between viewing the categories as natural or social in origin, 2) the categories serve as keys for social distribution of goods and burdens, and 3) the categories are more or less internalized and more or less externally reinforced as individual identities.

We will study these categories as they relate to specific political contingencies. This will therefore be a cross-national comparative study. We will be studying policies and categories in Norway, USA, and Brazil in relation to compensatory policies aimed to redress racial/ethnic/class discrimination and in relation to changing patterns and politics of migration.