Friday 18th January 2013 - Taking the bigger view in public lectures

Singers and other musicians have a repertoire which they repeat in different places to different audiences. Lecturers can do the same.

This morning I gave a lecture to a Univerity of the Third Age (U3A) group here in Sheffield.   It is a lecture that I have been giving in one form or another for about 10 years now.  I have given it to schoolchildren, to local community organisations, to international audiences of strategic leaders, and to senior officials in the UK government.  The theme is global population change, and my aim in the lecture is to dispel some commonly-held myths about the dangers of global overpopulation by telling the story of the decline in family sizes almost everywhere around the world since the late 1960s.  It also goes on to look at some of the implications of these changes for issues such as future labour supply, demographic ageing, and future world economic development.  The lecture is changed every time I give it, of course. There is always a new set of demographic statistcis tot ake into account, and I also adjust the content to match the likely concerns of the audience.  The basic argument has remained largely unchanged, but the details, the examples and the material on consequences have all evolved over the years.

Those who know my recent research interests will know that this topic is not something I have been actively working on. Indeed, there is virtually no working academic writing on large-scale population change.  Although it is a vital topic, there is little mileage in it from the perspective of research funding, or publication in a major journal.  What policy implications are likely to come from it?  What impact will the research have?  It is not, therefore, a topic that lends itself to a good REF return.  It is the sort of topic that would require a whole book to do it justice, and a lot of the material would be empirical rather than highly analytical and theoretical.  Yet the public at large outside academia is keen to hear us on such major issues.  It is a shame that it falls largely to senior academic figures to provide these discussions in public lectures, rather than younger colleagues who might find innovative ways of conceptualising the issues.

My oft-repeated but constantly evolving talk on global population change is based on the fact that I have in the past served as both the secretary and the chair of the Population Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society.  In those capacities I, in the past, learned much from the work of colleageus working in other countries on their own local population issues and from them I also learned how to find my way around national and international data sources.  But I do worry that younger colleagues are not encouraged by today's system to develop these interests.  However, as long as they don't do so I can still take my lecture on tour.