Danny Dorling

Danny Dorling (born 16 January 1968) is a British social geographer.

In 1989 he became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS), and a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society (FRSS), in 2003 a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS), in 2010 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), in 2014 was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health (HonFFPH), and in 2015 he became a senior associate member of the Royal Society of Medicine (SARSM).

Dorling graduated with a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Geography, Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Newcastle in 1989 and completed a PhD in the Visualization of Spatial Social Structure under the supervision of Stan Openshaw in 1991.

From 1991 to 1993, Dorling was a Joseph Rowntree Foundation Fellow and from 1993 to 1996 he was British Academy Fellow at the University of Newcastle.

From 1996 to 2000, he was on the faculty of the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol.

From 2000 to 2003 he was Professor of Quantitative Human Geography at the University of Leeds.

From 2003 to 2013 he was Professor of Human Geography and also in 2013 he was Professor for the Public Understanding of Social Science at the University of Sheffield.

In 2005 he co-founded the Internet-based Worldmapper project, which now has about 700 world maps and spreadsheets of international statistics.

He has been on radio, television and in newspaper articles.

In February 2006, Dorling's work in human geography was described as "rummaging around" in numbers, crunching his way through reams of raw data, building up an extraordinary picture of poverty and wealth in contemporary Britain.

In April 2010, an editorial in The Guardian was entitled "In Praise of Danny Dorling".

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He is a patron of RoadPeace since 2011 and from 2007 to 2017 was the honorary president of the Society of Cartographers.

Since 2013, he has been Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford.

He is also a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology of Goldsmiths, University of London, a visiting professor in the School of Social and Community Medicine of the University of Bristol, a visiting fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, and a member of the National Advisory Panel for the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS).

In September 2013 he became the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, attached to St Peter's College, Oxford.

In his inaugural lecture he spoke about the increasing disparity between Britain's richest 1% and the rest.

He said: "Income inequality has now reached a new maximum and, for the first time in a century, even those just below the richest 1% are beginning to suffer, to see their disposable income drop."

He has mapped (mainly using cartograms), analysed and commented upon UK demographic statistics.

Dorling was very supportive of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader during his leadership from September 2015 until April 2020.

In May 2016, Dorling said: "Jeremy Corbyn can take on the zealots and bigots who use migration to stir up fear and hatred. His popular appeal is not based on stoking up current prejudices. It is based on conviction, love and compassion. Just how cynical do you have to be not to see the hope and possibility in that?"

In May 2017 he appeared in a Labour Party political broadcast – "Labour Stands With You" – filmed by Ken Loach and published a week before the 2017 United Kingdom general election.

In 2019 he was made an (honorary) Doctor of the University of York.

Born in Oxford, Dorling attended local state schools, including Cheney School, a coeducational comprehensive and was employed as a play-worker in children's summer play-schemes.