Events Management

I suppose my route into researching Events Management is a familiar one.  I was led there by my interest in both Sports Management and Tourism Management, and by researching at their interface – Sports Tourism.  The link to Events Management was inevitable.

Living in the UK it was also inevitable that I should be following the whole process leading up to London 2012, from inception to bidding and through to the Games themselves, and the current legacy phase.  The latter is of particular interest to me because of its link to my football research.

Winter Sports Tourism

Through my Visiting Professorship at the University of Applied Sciences in Kufstein in the Tirol, I’ve been drawn into researching Winter Sports and Winter Sports Tourism with colleagues there and at SRH Heidelberg in Germany.

Recently I was invited by North Caucasus Resorts to act as a ‘critical friend’ for their presentation at the 2012 St Petersburg International Economic Forum.  This is a very exciting development project on a staggering scale to build a cluster of world-class ski resorts across the North Caucasus region.

Sports tourism

For the thirtieth anniversary edition of Tourism Recreation Research I was invited to contribute an article on the impact of cross-border tourism from the perspective of peace and reconciliation generated by the opening of the India-Pakistan border for the first home Test match in fifty years.

As I felt that this was an article probably no-one could do justice to on their own, I worked with colleagues at Coventry University – Andrew Rigby (professor of Peace and Reconciliation), Ian Talbot (professor of South Asian Studies and cricket fan) and Shinder Thandi (expert on Punjabi Studies and cricket fan).

See here for the abstract.

More recently I wrote a book chapter which was a case study of the Barmy Army during the Cricket World Cup in the West Indies.