Uncertainty as Knowledge: Exploring Public and Professional Discourses on Low Fertility

Laura Stark, Princeton University

This paper explores how the social organization of demography's local scientific culture (Watkins 1993) helps shape demographic knowledge outside of the discipline. While recognizing that demographic knowledge is reproduced in new ways in its public circulation, my concern is how our discipline's scientific knowledge also derives many of its features from the way it organizes knowledge-producing communities (Swidler and Arditi 1994). Analyzing public and professional debates over contemporary fertility trends in Europe and beyond, I describe how demography negotiates its "presentation of scientific self" (Gieryn 1996). On one hand, in the popular press, the TFR is commonly used to substantiate the alarming problem of low fertility. At the same time within disciplinary boundaries, demographers reveal uncertainty in how best to measure contemporary fertility. After describing public and professional divergence, I ask how our own disciplinary practices themselves shape public and professional knowledge.