Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Population as a social, media and cultural concept -- Fertility promotion, power and contemporary eugenics -- Crowded concepts and the politics of the big nation -- Population and identity -- Overpopulation in visual representation -- Underpopulation and apocalyptic narratives -- Genetics, population purity and the 'race of devils' -- The 'forgotten' people -- Bodies, racialised populations and practices of othering -- Attitudes of welcome : ethics of cohabitation and sustainability.

In a world of increasing mobility and migration, population size and composition come under persistent scrutiny across public policy, public debate, and film and television. Drawing on media, cultural and social theory approaches, this book takes a fresh look at the concept of 'population' as a term that circulates outside the traditional disciplinary areas of demography, governance and statistics - a term which gives coherence to notions such as community, nation, the world and global humanity itself. It focuses on understanding how the concept of population governs ways of thinking about our own identities and forms of belonging at local, national and international levels; on the manner in which television genres fixate on depictions of overpopulation and underpopulation; on the emergence of questions of ethics of belonging and migration in relation to cities; on attitudes towards otherness; and on the use by an emergent alt-right politics of population in 'forgotten people' concepts. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography and media and cultural studies with interests in questions of belonging, citizenship and population