I began my academic research career undertaking my PhD in dance music and club culture.  My research took an ethnographic approach to understanding the motivations for participating in dance music culture and the preferences of individuals and what drove them to seek out specific experiences.  I am also very interested in the social construction of event spaces both in terms of the media discourses which surround event spaces and also the cultural iconography and symbolic interactionist elements of events.

I have also been involved in evaluating the economic and other aspects of large scale events, in this area recent research projects include evaluating the economic impacts of hosting the Volvo Ocean Race Cardiff Stopover in July 2018 and the economic impact evaluation of the UEFA Champions League Finals 2017 on behalf of the Welsh Government Major Events Unit.

More recently my research interests have focused on virtual and hybrid events as I believe there were significant advances made in this area during the pandemic and there are various benefits of these types of events both in terms of sustainability and the environment and also in terms of inclusivity and widening participation in events from a social and geographical perspective.

My methodological expertise is in ethnography, participant observation, discourse analysis and qualitative approaches.

I have also worked with the Quality Assurance Agency as a subject specialist on the 2015-2016 review of the Subject Benchmark Statements for Events, Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism.