Innovative and the first of its kind, this informative and multidisciplinary book explores the socio-cultural significance inherent in event infrastructures.
Innovative and the first of its kind, this informative and multidisciplinary book explores the socio-cultural significance inherent in event infrastructures.
While mainstream event management literature addresses event infrastructures mainly through its operational relevance, this carefully compiled edited volume takes infrastructures as an analytical point in respect to its social, political, economic and cultural potential of the study of events. Borrowing from the ongoing social scientific debates on the geography, sociology and anthropology of infrastructures, critical questions are posed in relation to the event contexts. With references to events in Argentina, Malawi, Spain and the UK among others, the volume combines an international perspective with a highly relevant subject for contemporary event management education.
By bringing together theoretical as well as empirical readings on the question of event infrastructures from a critical point of view, the debates are relevant to practitioners, researchers, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students in the field of events, leisure, tourism, anthropology, sociology, geography, and urban planning among others.
1. Introduction: Lost in Infrastructure. Part
1. Infrastructuring Space.
2. Revisiting the Spatial Relationships Between Mega-Events and Host Cities.
3. Interrogating Event-Induced but Underused Infrastructures: The White
Elephants of Spanish Mega-Events Linked to the Neoliberal Urbanism of Recent
Decades.
4. The Circus is Coming to Town Literally. Contestation and
Conflict Around Formula 1 Street Circuits.
5. Culture, Cognition, Events, and
Infrastructures. Part
2. Event Infrastructures as Expressions of in/Equality.
6. Exclusive Expectations: Examining the VIP Experience at UK Music Events.
7. Infrastructuring an Event. FemIT Conf 2021: Diversity and Technology in
Argentina.
8. Transforming Attitudes through Strategic Infrastructuring: The
Tumaini Festival in Malawis Dzaleka Refugee Camp.
9. The Genesis of a Shared
World Through Event Infrastructure: A Phenomenological Investigation of
Communitarisation in Shared and Extraordinary Experiences. Part
3. Events as
Infrastructure.
10. An Analysis of Multicultural Trends Underlying the
Maltese Festa in a Digital Era.
11. Events as Infrastructure and Learning
Experiences: Exemplified on an Alpine Peripheral Living Lab in Rural
Switzerland.
12. Events as Soft Infrastructure for Urban Development?
Learning from the Italian Capital of Culture Initiative.
13. Beyond Control:
Critical Reflections on Infrastructure and Events.
14. Last words?
Unconclusive remarks.
Barbara Grabher works as Lecturer in Event Studies at the University of Brighton, UK. As a trained anthropologist with a specialisation in gender studies, she researches event-based regeneration processes through a lens of critical event studies. Combining perspectives of event, gender and urban studies, she published the monograph Doing Gender in Events: Feminist Perspectives on Critical Event Studies (Routledge) in 2022. In her current project Between Culture and Salt, she considers the notion of the Anthropocene and its conceptual and empirical potential for the field of event studies in regards to the case study of Bad Ischl-Salzkammergut European Capital of Culture 2024.
Ian R. Lamond is Senior Lecturer in Events at Leeds Beckett University (UK) in the UK Centre for Event Management (UKCEM). Ians academic background is in philosophy, particular social and cultural theory, and contemporary European thought. His interests include the conceptual foundations of event studies, protest events, end-of-life events and events associated with deviant leisure. He is the co-author and co-editor of several books in the broad field of critical event studies.
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