In July 2026, I led a student group to Henan Normal University in Xinxiang for the Digital Intelligence Empowering Sports-Culture Inheritance and Innovation Seminar, an academic event connected with the Chinese Association of Sport Science.
The theme sat right at a lively intersection: how digital tools, cultural memory, teaching practice, and sport scholarship can inform one another. For students, it was also a chance to see academic exchange outside the classroom and to connect research questions with a broader cultural setting.
The trip was small in scale but rich in texture: listening, presenting, discussing, and then walking through the city together. Those informal moments are often where students start to understand academic work as something lived rather than only assigned.
I hope this kind of experience can keep making research feel closer to practice: a way of asking better questions about sport, education, culture, and the technologies now entering all of them.
