Dr Jamelia Harris presented her research at international conferences

IER's Dr Jamelia Harris presented research findings at two international academic conferences this month drawing on work from two different research projects.

Dr Harris shared work from the project "Help or hindrance? Exploring the impact of foreign aid on local skills" at the 23rd Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South (N-AERUS) Conference. Dr Harris presented a paper titled "Foreign Aid and Skills in Developing Countries: Towards a Holistic Framework of National Skills Development" which explores the many ways in which foreign aid can impact on skills development in developing countries, analysing direct, indirect and unintentional consequences of the aid-skills nexus.

At the 3rd MethodsNET Conference, Dr Harris presented work from the project "Colonial legacies and the labour market in the English-speaking Caribbean". This presentation centred on the methodological design of the interdisciplinary project which brings together an economist and historian and uses quantitative and qualitative methods to study the labour market in four Caribbean countries spanning 1800 to 2025. The paper argues for the practice of mixed methods research to understand questions that span lengthy time periods and for which contextualisation is critical. It also highlights some of the challenges of conducting this type of work in the Global South and extracts lesson for the decolonial agenda.