David McGillivray | David McGillivray

A Year without Festivals (or public space)

I started 2020 looking forward to working with colleagues on the HERA-funded Festspace project to explore the relationship between festivals, events and public space. In January 2020, I was invited to speak at the Cockburn Association’s ‘City for Sale‘ event in Edinburgh, where there had been a furore over the impact of that city’s winter…

FESTSPACE: Festivals, event and inclusive public space in Europe

In early June, along with my co-investigators Dr Andrew Smith, Dr Bernadette Quinn, Dr Alba Colombo and Dr Kristina Lindstrom, I helped launch our HERA-funded FESTSPACE project the University of the West of Scotland’s Paisley Campus. This project focuses on the role of festivals and events in producing inclusive public space and involves a much…

Leveraging Disability Sport Events

In 2013, along with Dr Laura Misener (Western University, Prof David Legg, (Mount Royal University) and my colleague Prof Gayle McPherson (UWS), I embarked on a major Canadian/UK research project focused on the role of parasport events in leveraging sustainable community participation for persons with a disability. It has been a great experience to be…

EventRights: Major Sport Events and Human Rights

After what felt like a very long wait (4 or 5 months) I was delighted to receive an email in July confirming that a research and knowledge exchange project I’ve helped design had been funded by the European Commission under its Horizon 2020 MSCA RISE stream. In the intensely competitive HEI environment we occupy it’s…

Participatory Action Research in the Field

Earlier this year, along with colleagues from the School of Media, Culture & Society at UWS, I led the delivery of a doctoral training course on participatory action research for social sciences and arts and humanities students from across Scotland. The course was designed to be interactive, learning from doctoral students undertaking PAR-related work and…

Social Media for Research

Over the course of the last few months I’ve been asked to deliver a number of sessions on the role of social media in the research process, especially as we increasingly talk about ‘impact’ in the lead up to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework exercise in 2021. I have developed a set of slides that…

Digital Leisure Cultures: Transformations, Tribulations and Creative Resistance

I was delighted to be invited to deliver a keynote talk at the annual OcioGune conference organised by the Institute of Leisure Studies at the University of Deusto, Bilbao. This year the topic was “Leisure and the new technological ecosystems”. I delivered a talk and some ‘picture’ slides which are accessible below: I firstly discussed…