Usually, when I give a talk, I’m sharing work in progress. The conference is, for me, a way to share my ideas, to learn who else is working on similar directions, and hopefully to fill in some of the gaps in my work as I get it ready for writing.

This time, however, it was something new. I spoke at a conference called “Olympic Games and Global Cities”, organized by the Fondation France-Japon at l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, with Kyoto Seika University. Here, instead of work in progress, I gave something more of a retrospective. My “Promises and Problems: Investigating mega-event legacies of sustainability and geopolitics” was a picture of my own work over the past year, both individually and in collaboration at the University of Lausanne with Martin Müller, David Gogishvili, and others. It was a new feeling, looking over the mega-events-related work I’ve done, particularly as I;m starting to grow and publish beyond the boundaries of that subdiscipline.

Part of the talk was given to sharing information about our contribution on the declining sustainability of the Olympic Games, published in Nature Sustainability. And part of it discussed my project submission to the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Ambizione grant. I won’t hear back from them until May 2022 at least, but the project represents a nice evolution of my thinking, and it wouldn’t have been right to give this sort of research overview without discussion where I’m trying to go.

Overall the conference was a satisfying end to a long and active year. I talked all around the world – USA, UK, France, Japan, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Ukraine, Nigeria – but I hardly left my home office. A weird mix. I wish I’d been able to go to all these places in real life, though, and really lament the fact that I missed seeing Minna and Tokyo! Maybe next year.

Until then, I think it’s time to cut back on the conferences for a while, and refocus on writing and teaching. All of this, naturally, from the home office as well.