Triple election joy for sporting expert

Professor John Horne has been elected to positions of responsibility within three major international and national scholarly associations.

Professor Horne has joined the Nominations Committee of the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS), become Vice Chair of the British Sociological Association (BSA) and from January 2016 will take up the role of Vice President and Treasurer of the International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA).

The AcSS is the national academy of academics, learned societies and practitioners in the social sciences.

The Academy is made up of around 1000 individual Fellows, 43 Learned Societies and a number of affiliate members, together representing nearly 90,000 social scientists.

Founded in 1951, the BSA is the national subject association for sociologists in the UK and its primary objective is to promote sociology. Members of the Association are drawn from a wide range of backgrounds and include researchers, teachers, students and practitioners in a variety of fields.

The Association represents UK sociology on key bodies both nationally and internationally, working closely with allied organizations to influence policies affecting sociology within the wider social sciences remit.

Through its publications, research groups and busy calendar of events, the BSA provides a network of communication to enable the promotion and use of sociology and sociological research.

The ISSA is a research committee of the International Sociological Association (ISA) where it is officially recognized as RC27 (Sociology of Sport) and also an official committee of the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education (ICSSPE).

ISSA holds annual conferences, including congresses in conjunction with the World Congress of Sociology and the Pre-Olympic Scientific Congress, and publishes the International Review for the Sociology of Sport (IRSS).

Professor Horne's expertise has been in much demand throughout 2015, joining panel discussions at Leeds Beckett and Bournemouth Universities, and following up his recent research into sports mega-events by co-editing a collection of articles with Professor Richard Gruneau from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

Entitled 'Mega-Events and Globalization: Capital and Spectacle in a Changing World Order', the collection will be published by Routledge later this year.

He has also received an invitation to take part at an international workshop, 'More than just a game: mobilities, infrastructures & imaginaries of global sports events', to be hosted by the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in October 2015.