This project examines the question of population in the 19th and 20th centuries. "Population" is not understood as a real object that can be measured in statistics, but as a construct through which complex demographic and biological processes are brought together into a specific form. The technocratic approach to "population" was intended to correct the distortions of modern industrial society by reorganising social relations around the axes of "class", "race" and "gender". The population question, according to the project's thesis, is to be understood as an ongoing commentary on the development of industrial modernity, and at the same time as an instrument of intervention. The genesis and successful career of the population question, which still characterises the demographic debate today, will be traced for the period from around 1798 to around 1987. Methodologically, particular emphasis will be placed on analysing the interplay of discursive and non-discursive practices (especially techniques of visualisation, through which "population" was made visible in the first place). In this way, structure (matrix, institutional dispositions) and dynamics (generational change, social change) are to be analysed in their interplay and in their significance for the genesis, development and adaptation of "population".

• Sub-project 1: "Population" as an "epistemic thing" (Thomas Etzemüller)
  
• Sub-project 2: Prosopographical study (Maria Daldrup)
  
• Sub-project 3: On the history of human genetics in Germany and Denmark(Dirk Thomaschke)

The project was funded by the DFG.

Most important publications:

• Thomas Etzemüller: In Search of the Nordic Man. German racial anthropology in the modern world, Bielefeld 2015
  
• Thomas Etzemüller (ed.): From "Volk" to "Population". Interventionist population policy in the post-war period, Münster 2015
  
• Thomas Etzemüller: What can we learn from racial anthropology? From the engine room of an undead discipline, in: Merkur 70, 2016, H. 805, pp. 29-41
  
• Thomas Etzemüller: The "imbeciles of Moordorf". The docu-fictional reconstruction of a racial study that made it never never existed, in: Freist, Dagmar (ed.): ArchivGeschichten. Festschrift for Gerd Steinwascher, Stuttgart 2018, pp. 206-220
  
• Thomas Etzemüller: Henning von Rittersdorf: Das Deutsche Schicksal. Memoirs of a racial anthropologist. A docu-fiction, Bielefeld 2021
  
• Dirk Thomaschke: In the Society of Genes. Spaces and subjects of human genetics in Germany and Denmark, 1950-1990, Bielefeld 2014