The colloquium
Demography has travelled a long way since it was defined by A.B. Wolfe in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences of 1930 as “a kind of bio-social book-keeping, a continuous inventory and analysis of the human population and its vital processes, collectively considered.”
Other disciplines, most stringently perhaps econometrics, have adopted key elements of demographic methodology. But as new types of data (longitudinal datasets, panels and pseudo-panels) have become available in many fields of social research, demographic methods for analysing them are still on the march. Demography itself, on the other hand, has integrated topics, methods and frameworks from other branches of science: epidemiology, genetics, sociology, history, economy and anthropology to name just a few. Throughout his career, Ron Lesthaeghe always stressed the importance of embedding demographic research in the broad knowledge stream of the human sciences.
Today we wonder whether our discipline has faded, becoming part of the general toolkit of social science, or rather, has enriched and redefined itself as a new social science in which population change (structural as well as cultural) interacts with its social environment.
At any rate, demography has become, at the beginning of the 21st century a discipline dealing with the main challenges of humanity, broad in scope and multidisciplinary in its own approach.
The aim of the current colloquium is to stimulate reflection on both the new challenges we are confronted with and the state of the art of research in demography. The topics that will be addressed are population dynamics, health and mortality, fertility, and international migration and how these affect our societies and our very values.
Ron Lesthaeghe
Ron Lesthaeghe earned his license degree and his PhD in the Social Sciences at the Ghent University, and obtained his MA in Sociology from Brown University. He has been a research associate at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, and worked for the Population Council as regional representative for West Africa. From 1971 he was lecturer and then professor of Demography and Social Science Methodology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
His research has been in various sub-fields of demography, mainly covering populations of Europe and of sub-Saharan Africa. Most recently he has focussed largely on the ‘second demographic transition’, a concept he introduced in collaboration with Dick Van de Kaa.
Ron Lesthaeghe has received national and international recognition, including visiting professorships, the 2003 Irene Taueber Award of the Population Association of America, and the 2005 Ernest-Solvay Prize of the Belgian National Science Foundation. His international colleagues ranked him 10th among the most influential demographers in the period 1950-2000.
In 2005 he retired as professor at the VUB but he is still continuing his research, extending it to the analyses of the US and Asia at the Departments of Sociology/ Population Studies Centers of the Universities of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and California (Irvine).