Finding a Place for Spatial Demography in the Curriculum: Emerging Trends, and the Opportunities and Challenges in Training the Next Generation of Demographers

I argue that while demography is inherently a spatial science the training many demographers receive in fundamental spatial concepts, geospatial data and analytical methods is often limited, patchwork or nonexistent. However many important demographic questions deserve to be studied and framed using spatial approaches and this will become even more evident as changes in the volume, source, and form of available demographic data – much of it geocoded – further changes the data landscape and thus the methods demographers need to utilize. Ultimately changes in the data demographers use (how they collect, link, and analyze data) suggest the need to train next-generation population scientists in spatial thinking, concepts and methods of analysis. This will be a challenge given the existing logistical constraints on demography training. That is, any emergent method has to compete for its own place within the established curricula which will include core courses (e.g., fertility, migration, mortality), an expansive range of substantive cores (e.g., population and environment, urbanization) and other methods courses (e.g., demographic techniques, event history analysis, multilevel modeling). In this paper I propose and discuss some potential solutions to promoting and facilitating instruction in spatial demography across the globe.