Fertility

Abstract

Fertility is understood most widely in geography as one of the three determinants of population change, alongside migration and mortality. Everyone is born, everyone moves geographically in some manner, and everyone eventually dies. Such self‐evident understanding belies the importance of the conceptual framing of these processes, and none more so than fertility. There have been longstanding calls for the analysis of fertility to move beyond method and concern with techniques of measurement and toward being able to ask more critical questions. The intersection and interrelationship of material and discursive fields in relation to bodies and places is a critical place from which the analysis of fertility can expand. Fertility studies in geography are an important route into working with contemporary social justice issues around women's sexual and reproductive health and rights.