June Moore Institute Webinar to Address Impact of COVID-19 on Sport

NUI Galway’s Moore Institute will host a webinar to address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sport on Thursday, 25 June, at 4pm. Sport is one of the most important and popular areas of activity across society – for participants as well as fans. Cancellation of sporting events due to Covid-19 has had a huge impact in Ireland and around the world. This webinar brings together leading authorities to look at sport nationally and internationally during the crisis from a variety of perspectives, including the history of sport, sports governance and policy, sports practitioners and representative organisations, sport and the media, and gender and sport.

Contributors to the webinar:

• Professor Paul Rouse, UCD, one of the leading experts on the history of Irish sport
• Dr Mary O’Connor, CEO of the Federation of Irish Sport, and All-Ireland winning player and All-Star with Cork in camogie and Gaelic football
• Dr Niamh Kitching, Mary Immaculate College, whose work focuses on gender equality and sport, including female athletes and coaches
• Dr Marcus Free, Mary Immaculate College, who specialises on media and sport
• Dr Borja García, Loughborough University, an authority on sports policy and governance and member of the European Commission’s expert group on sport policy

The webinar will be chaired by Dr Seán Crosson of the Huston School of Film and Digital Media at NUI Galway, and leader of the Sport and Exercise Research Group in the Moore Institute.

Dr Crosson said: “We are delighted to bring together such a distinguished range of speakers to contribute to our webinar on sport and covid-19. Sport, like all other areas of our lives, has been impacted upon in unprecedented ways since the advent of the current crisis. This has presented challenges to all those engaged with sport, but also perhaps opportunities to reassess the place and contribution of sport within society in the future.”

The webinar forms part of the Moore Institute’s COVID-19 Response Series. Director of the Moore Institute, Professor Daniel Carey, said: “Access to sport is something we tend to take for granted, either for exercise or entertainment. Few areas generate the same level of excitement and commitment. Covid-19 has massively altered the landscape. But our attachments are still apparent in nostalgia for sport and the replaying of historic matches and contests. This webinar will offer us ways to think about sport and how we restart this area of major activity.”

To attend please register using this link: https://bit.ly/2N2MDxX.

For more on the Moore Institute’s COVID-19 Response Series visit https://mooreinstitute.ie/research-group/moore-institute-covid-19-response-group/

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