News Releases

Influential sports educator to speak at UWI/First Citizens conference

For Release Upon Receipt - December 19, 2013

St. Augustine


ST. AUGUSTINE, Trinidad and Tobago – In January 2014, Jay Coakley, Professor Emeritus, Sociology Department, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs will speak at The University of the West Indies (UWI) and First Citizens Sports Foundation conference on sport and higher education. The conference is titled "Science, Higher Education and Business: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sports Studies, Research and Development". 

Professor Coakley, in addition to his work on Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies, has co-edited with Eric Dunning (University of Loughborough, UK), the Handbook of Sports Studies (Sage Publications, 2000), and with Peter Donnelly, Inside Sports (Routledge, 1999). He has authored over 150 articles and book chapters, primarily on sport, society, and culture. Much of this work focuses on youth sports and socialization issues, race and ethnicity, gender, deviance and violence. 

Science, Higher Education and Business seeks to fill the void with respect to the body of Caribbean-oriented sport research and scholarship which connects to both the development of sports and the use of sport for development. Such a void exists despite significant developments within the Commonwealth Caribbean in the study of sport and its institutionalisation as part of the system of higher education.

The conference targets academics involved in higher education in sport-related areas, students involved in sports education programmes, other higher education practitioners/professionals and sport administrators. It also further aims to strengthen the network of tertiary level sport educators in the Caribbean region, improve the quality of sport programmes (both academic and physical), and improve tools used to address situations with regards to student athletes in competitive sport.General registration continues until the day of the conference, which takes place from January 15-18, 2014, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Port of Spain.For more information, please visit www.sta.uwi.edu/sportstudiesconference.

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Note to the editor

More about Professor Coakley   

Professor Jay Coakley has lectured worldwide at universities and conferences for professional associations, and often speaks to groups of coaches and sport administrators. He also has lectured on issues of race and cultural diversity in sports and academic institutions.

He currently holds a Visiting Professor appointment at the University of Chichester in West Sussex, England where he was also awarded an honorary fellowship in 2007. He was the founding editor of the Sociology of Sport Journal (1983-1989) and serves on the editorial boards of scholarly journals in sociology and kinesiology/physical education. He is past president of the Sport Sociology Academy of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance, and of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport; he continues to serve on national and international committees and is currently doing research with colleagues in Slovenia and Brazil, and is working with the newly formed Latin American Association for the Sociocultural Study of Sports. 

In 2009, Professor Coakley was named to the Hall of Fame of the National Association for Sport and Physical Education and was identified in 2007 as one of the “100 Most Influential Sports Educators by the Institute for International Sport. Active in connection with social issues, he also received in 2004 the Citizenship Through Sports Annual Award, from the Citizenship Through Sports Alliance.

Professor Coakley received his MA (1970) and PhD (1972) degrees from the University of Notre Dame. He currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.  

About UWI

Over the last six decades, The University of the West Indies (UWI) has evolved from a fledgling college in Jamaica with 33 students to a full-fledged University with over 40,000 students. Today, UWI is the largest and most longstanding higher education provider in the English-speaking Caribbean, with main campuses in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, and Centres in Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, The Bahamas, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St Christopher (St Kitts) & Nevis, St Lucia, and St Vincent & the Grenadines. UWI recently launched its Open Campus, a virtual campus with over 50 physical site locations across the region, serving over 20 countries in the English-speaking Caribbean. UWI is an international university with faculty and students from over 40 countries and collaborative links with over 60 universities around the world. Through its seven Faculties, UWI offers undergraduate and postgraduate degree options in Engineering, Humanities & Education, Law, Medical Sciences, Pure & Applied Sciences, Science and Agriculture, and Social Sciences.

(Please note that the proper name of the university is The University of the West Indies, inclusive of the “The”, hence The UWI.)

For the latest UWI News, click http://sta.uwi.edu/news.   

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