nvitation: 26/02/2026 – UNU-MERIT Migration Seminar Series: Who counts and who’s counted: the complicated relationship between migrants and population data

Abstract: Counting the population is one of the basic ambitions of governments, for the sake of public policy. But having comprehensive data on populations is a relatively new invention and it certainly hasn’t been a smooth road to get to where we are now. For people who are marginalised, appearing in population statistics can signal recognition, acknowledgement and legitimacy – but it can also be something to be viewed with suspicion or avoided altogether. This seminar explains how migrants first started to be counted in the UK and how the act of counting – historically through censuses – was a negotiation between a state which wanted information and people who often only wanted to leave the statistical shadows if it was on their own terms. Even in the nineteenth century, censuses showed an extraordinary diversity of foreign-born people in parts of London and even recorded people who had fled slavery in the United States. Data which people had given in good faith on their country of birth was used during the Second World War to round up certain migrant groups and send them to internment camps. More recently, in the 1990s, we started to collect data on ethnicity – indicating migrant heritage – according to categories of people’s own choosing, which was a milestone after centuries of using sometimes offensive top-down classifications. Population data is one of the most amazing achievements of democratic societies. But we shouldn’t take it at face value. We should cherish it, while being critical of it in the right way – and we should pay close attention to how it evolves. The Seminar will take place on zoom please click on this link to join. 

Bio: Georgina Sturge is a specialist in statistics and the author of the critically acclaimed Bad Data: How Governments, Politicians, and the Rest of Us Get Misled by Numbers Links to an external site. (2022). Her latest book Sum of Us: A History of the UK in Data Links to an external site. (2025) is a social history of the UK told through moments when people started to be counted in different ways. From 2018 to 2025, Georgina was a statistical researcher at the House of Commons Library, the in-house research service to the UK Parliament, where she authored material for debates and briefed MPs and their staff. Prior to working at Parliament, she was a quantitative researcher at the Overseas Development Institute. She is now Research Affiliate at the University of Oxford, providing data expertise to its Migration Observatory Links to an external site., a Researcher at Maastricht University, and a freelance writer.  Georgina has been an expert advisor to the UK Office for National Statistics since 2018 and chairs its Migration Statistics User Forum. In her role as an author, she has appeared on BBC Radio, including as a guest on the statistics programme More or Less, and in UK print publications such as The Times and The Guardian. Her TEDx Talk, ‘What’s so dangerous about bad data?’ (2023) is available to watch online . 

For further information, please contract Soha Youssef (convenor of the Migration seminar series, on behalf of UNU- MERIT & MACIMIDE): youssef@merit.unu.edu