John Karamichas

My research interests circumnavigate the environmental sociological imagination and focus on issues of environmental social contestation and prospects for environmental sustainability. My latest exploration has been centred on a critical evaluation of the proclaimed improvements in the environmental capacity of Olympic Games host nations. My most recent book, The Olympic Games and the Environment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), employs key insights from sociological theorisation, reflexive modernisation, towards identifying indicators capable to assess the environmental legacy imbued by four successive Olympic Games (Sydney 2000, Athens 2004, Beijing 2008 and London 2012).

My previous work on sport mega-events, Olympic Games, Mega-Events and Civil Societies. Globalization, Environment, Resistance (with Graeme Hayes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), explored sports mega-events; their social, political and cultural characters; the value systems that they inscribe and draw on; the claims they make on us and the claims the organizers make for them, the spatial and ethical relationships they create; and the responses of civil societies to them.

I have also published papers on contentious politics in Southern Europe and have been working on capacity for environmental sustainability under austerity as well as protest mobilisations against hosting the Olympic Games.

I am interested in supervising theses in the fields of protest politics, mega-events, environmental sustainability and harm.