Keynote Speaker
Prof Ronald Skeldon
Ronald Skeldon is a part-time (66 per cent) Professorial Fellow in the Department of Geography in the School of Social and Cultural Studies. After taking a B.Sc. (Hons) in Geography at the University of Glasgow in 1967, he completed an M.A. and a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, with a dissertation on population migration in Peru. He became a Research Fellow at the New Guinea Research Unit of the Australian National University, later the Papua New Guinea Institute for Applied Social and Economic Research, in Port Moresby, 1974-77. He then joined the United Nations, initially as a census adviser in Papua New Guinea, 1977-79, and later as a population expert based in Bangkok, 1979-82. In 1982, he joined the faculty of the University of Hong Kong, where he remained until 1996, leaving as a Professor of Geography. After four years as an independent consultant based in Bangkok working mainly for United Nations organizations, he joined the University of Sussex in October 2000. He remains an Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong and an Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Population and Social Research at Mahidol University, Thailand. He has been a consultant to several international organizations, including the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), and to UK government departments such as the Department for International Development (DFID).
Research interests
His research is based around issues of population and development, primarily in East and Southeast Asia. Recent work has focused on the migrations of the Chinese peoples, particularly from Hong Kong, and on irregular movements of migrants in and through Southeast Asia. Other research has concentrated on population mobility and HIV/AIDS in Southeast Asia and on questions of child labour in Asia. Since joining the University of Sussex, he has, together with colleagues in the Migration Research Unit, contributed to research into those held in detention centres in the UK and to research into the potential value of longitudinal surveys of international migrants. Both projects were funded by the Home Office. He is part of the core team in the DFID-funded Development Research Centre (DRC) on Migration, Globalization and Development at the University of Sussex. He has particular responsibility for the co-ordination of research on skilled migration. He also contributes to DFID-supported research on migration and poverty in Asia.
Teaching
At the University of Sussex, he is sole teacher of Theories of Development and Underdevelopment in the M.A. in the Rural Development and Social Development streams in the Culture, Development and Environment (CDE) programme. He teaches about half of two third-year undergraduate courses, Population and Development and Migration in Japan and East Asia, and contributes to the first-year course Human Geography. He is also one of the three co-teachers on the annual field trips of the University of Sussex, Department of Geography, to Thailand or Vietnam.