Accueil d’une doctorante

Emily Marshall, doctorante à Princeton University, Depatment of sociology, est accueillie à l’OSC jusqu’ au 4 décembre 2010.

Son séjour s’inscrit dans le cadre du programme Global Network on Inequality.

Son mail : emarshal@Princeton.edu

Elle est installée dans la salle des doctorants de l’OSC.

Son projet de recherche :

Family policy has important implications for inequality, as it has been a crucial component of redistributive social welfare policy in industrialized nations throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The processes by which family policies were introduced and have evolved are thus an important topic of study for the field of social inequality. In this project, I will examine pivotal episodes in the development of family policy in Great Britain and France, focusing on the activities of the British Royal Commission on Population (1944-1949) and the French Haut Comité de la Population (1939-1941). I will use archival and published materials from these two investigative bodies, each charged by the state with making recommendations for policy approaches to declining fertility, to ask how their deliberations and conclusions influenced the two states’ greatly differing post-war positions on population and family policy. This project, a central part of my dissertation research, requires access to the two countries’ National Archives in London and Paris, which house records from the meetings of these commissions. While conducting this research, I would also greatly benefit from the guidance of colleagues who specialize on the history of social policy in these countries.

My dissertation examines how very different discourses on fertility and policy approaches were sustained in post-war France and Great Britain, despite very similar period fertility rates throughout the period from 1950 to 1995. My analysis focuses on the impact of a key factor contributing to policy differences: shared frames for understanding below-replacement fertility – its status as a social problem, its causes, and appropriate solutions. In order to better understand how national differences in frames emerge and influence national policy differences, I will investigate the processes by which shared frames for low fertility are created, disseminated, and maintained, with special attention to the ways that demographic experts shape these frames through participation in public debates. By analyzing the participation of experts (demographers employed in universities and research institutes) in policy processes and media discussions about European low fertility, I will determine how the extent and form of expert contributions affects the content of these public debates. This two-country case study of Britain and France also allows me to examine how expert participation differs across national contexts.

The two countries’ shared interwar concern over low fertility, and nearly identical period fertility rates for most of the post-war twentieth century, make their very different policy approaches during the same period puzzling. The workings of the British and French Commissions will shed light on this puzzle. As officially-sanctioned, well-publicized panels created to address below-replacement fertility, they served as sites for the creation, borrowing, and disseminating of frames on low fertility; the French Commission’s recommendations strongly influenced post-war policy. While the British Commission was the turning point from interwar concern to postwar unconcern, the French Comité extended state concern and involvement into the post-war period. The British Commission has received little attention from scholars thus far, unlike the French Haut Comité; this research will build on existing studies by using the analytic concept of frames as a new approach to understanding the deliberations and conclusions of both commissions, as well as the outcomes that resulted from these conclusions.