Future trajectories of festival research

Festivals in a climate changing world

Perhaps surprisingly, Franklin and Crang’s editorial does not mention what has become the major concern for almost any research in the first two decades of the 21st century, climate change, nor is there reference to sustainability as some way to responding to this challenge. This may reflect a shift in conceptual thinking as tourism scholars consider how climate change is altering the world we have taken for granted. The Anthropocene means that communities are facing complex challenges of social, cultural, environmental and economic transition, adaptation and decline, which changing climatic conditions have only exacerbated (Hancock et al., 2020; Mair and Laing, 2013).

There is a complex relationship between events and climate change. On the one hand, festivals and events are significant emitters of greenhouse gases, particularly through their transport and energy use (Collins and Potoglou, 2019). On the other hand, however, events offer an opportunity to showcase best practice in mitigation and adaptation and have the potential to educate, inform and influence behaviour amongst attendees (Mair, 2014). While there has been considerable environmentally-focused research on festivals, investigating both supply and demand side issues (see, e.g. work by Jones, 2017), there is a startling lack of research in the impact of climate change on festivals and events (Mair, 2020). Research tends to focus on festivals as sites for education in sustainability (Collins and Cooper, 2017), or on how climate change is impacting on what festivals celebrate, that of tangible and intangible heritage (Perry et al., 2020), and therefore the emphasis remains on things like policy or management. Each festival and its associated communities and location will be uniquely vulnerable, depending on location, season, type and so on (Mair, 2011). It therefore follows that, similar to businesses in the broader tourism sector (Becken and Hay, 2007; Scott et al., 2019; Simpson et al., 2008), managing the impact of climate change will be highly variable – there will be no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. More recent work is starting to explore the particularity of relations between festivals, places and communities and what such relations may mean for critically engaging with and addressing climate change (e.g. Alonso-Vazquez et al., 2019; Ritts and Bakker, 2019).

Festivals in an age of risk

In addition to the existential crisis brought about by climate change, 2020’s Covid-19 pandemic has brought a completely different risk-related issue, and throughout the world, festivals were cancelled entirely, or were only able to provide a small part of their usual offering online. These challenges raise questions about the future of festivals at least until an effective vaccine is available (Campbell and Boisvert, 2021; Caust, 2020; Purtill, 2019; Watson, 2020). The economic impact has been severe, and it will be some time before we can return to the size and scale of pre-Covid events. Planning for the near future remains uncertain; will festivals become more exclusive, or will stakeholders need to hold small-scale, more localised events (Davies, 2020)? Nonetheless, the pandemic has provided insight into the important health benefits that come out of festival attendance. As social media videos of neighbours singing with each other in global lockdown in March, first in Italy then spreading around the world, demonstrate, we crave human contact, interaction and support (Greenberg and Gordon, 2020), and the space and time of the festival is a means to enhance and prioritise such social engagement.

Festival scholars are also suggesting that the pandemic offers us opportunities to radically rethink our world, especially in the broader context of climate change worsened by Covid-19. For example, the push for responsible tourism seeks to redress inequalities through ‘a commitment to an ethos of participation and responsibility, experience with a collective overcoming of hardship, and the flattening or inversion of social hierarchies’ (Rowen, 2020: 697), an ethos that resonates with the understanding of festivals as a site of rites of passage and transformation (Turner, 1975). In a similar vein, although acknowledging it is still too early to determine the full impact of the pandemic on the tourism industry, Higgins-Desbiolles (2020: 620) argues the industry should not return to ‘business as usual’ because ‘tourism has supported neoliberal injustices and exploitation’, and what ‘the COVID-19 pandemic crisis offers [is] a rare and invaluable opportunity to rethink and reset tourism . . . to enable human thriving and ecological recovery’.

However, the pandemic is not the only significant risk issue for festivals. In recent years, festivals (and other events) have hit the headlines for a number of unwanted reasons. These include terrorist attacks (e.g. the Nice truck bombing of the 2016 Bastille Day celebrations which killed 87 and injured over 400 and the 2017 Las Vegas shootings at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival, where 60 people were killed and over 800 injured) and bad weather (e.g. the 2011 Indiana State Fair stage collapse, which was caused by a severe thunderstorm and resulted in 7 deaths and 58 injured). Such major incidents, as well as many other smaller incidents resulting in death and serious injury at festivals have led to increasing demands from festival funders and insurers for substantial risk management activities (Andersson et al., 2020). This has resulted in a significant increase in interest in, and research on, risk management for festivals and events.

Festivals and technology

It will come as no surprise to note that the pace of technology has not slowed down in the 20 years since Franklin and Crang published their editorial, as Nuenen and Scarles discuss more fully in their commentary presented in this issue. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that despite its importance even 20 years ago, the editorial did not explicitly consider the impact that new technologies would have on tourism and events. In the context of festivals, as in other spheres of life, technology is changing all the time and the pace of change is unlikely to lessen in the coming years. As noted by Bossey (2019: 407), ‘social media continues to grow in popularity, as do event apps; while virtual/augmented reality and big data and analytics are creeping towards wider adoption’. However, research is struggling to keep up with such new developments and so there is a significant gap in our knowledge of the impacts of new technologies on festival organisers and attendees (Mair and Weber, 2019).

There are, broadly speaking, two main ways of conceptualising the impact of technology on festival studies – first, developments in hardware and software designed to facilitate new, more efficient and more effective ways of experiencing festivals; and second, developments in social media and digital marketing, which provide platforms for user generated content and personalisation of experiences. Festival organisers are looking to integrate hardware, software, netware (networked operating systems) and humanware (hardware or software specifically built around the user’s needs) into the attendee experience (Van Winkle et al., 2018). In relation to the ways that festivals are planned and managed using new technology and hardware, one of the biggest developments in the past 20 years has arguably been the introduction of virtual or hybrid events. Virtual festivals generally take place fully online, and are experienced ‘as live’ by attendees (e.g. when a musical performance is livestreamed without a face-to-face audience). Hybrid festivals on the other hand often integrate virtual elements (such as a video performance by a musician either pre-recorded or screened live to attendees) into a live event (Van Winkle et al., 2018).

Another development that has taken on unexpected prominence since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic is the ‘networked event’. Although these have been known about for many years, they have become almost a new normal. Lazzaro and Wawrzynek (2001) introduced the concept of the networked event as referring to a performance by several different musicians located in different physical locations who interact online to perform in exactly the same way that they would if they were located in the same room. The technology to remove ‘lag’ in the audio and video transmission has now progressed to such an extent that highly professional performances are now possible via the networked event (Bossey, 2019). Nonetheless, festivals have strong connections with connectivity, communitas (Turner, 1975) and togetherness, and while technology allows the performance element to continue even without a live audience, challenges remain in engendering the sense of euphoria – and its health benefits – that attending a live event can bring (Bossey, 2019).

In terms of user generated content, music festival organisers have been proactive in using social media since its inception and research shows that social media has a significant influence on emotions and attachments to festival brands (Hudson and Hudson, 2013). Social media is defined by Sigala (2019a: 103) as ‘platforms enabling users to meet, network, socialise, collaborate, store, share and distribute information and resources’. Social media has affected festivals in two main ways – first, it has expanded the place/space in which festivals take place and/or are distributed; and second, it has allowed many different actors to initiate and organise festivals (Sigala, 2019a). Social media is also changing the way potential attendees make their attendance decision, with potential attendees being transformed from ‘passive value takers to active value makers’ (Sigala, 2019b: 165). Attendees can use social media at various stages of a festival, from purchase to experience and post-festival recollections. However, there have been criticisms of the influence of social media on the festival experience, as it can detract from the live experience by reducing interaction with those co-present (Sigala, 2019b). Given the ‘omnipresent’ nature of social media, there is ample room for new studies in the festival context (Mair and Weber, 2019).

Socio-cultural impacts of festivals

Festivals possess a powerful and intoxicating effect that is significant to sustaining and transforming social life (Mackley-Crump, 2015). They are sites where people can experience and explore multiple identities, and where communities can represent and perform their public life and social identities (Duffy and Mair, 2018). Festivals can also facilitate interactions between individuals who may not otherwise meet – both those within a geographically local community, and those within a broader community of interest. Further, while the festival itself may only offer opportunities for brief encounters, these initial connections can lead to a broader exchange of knowledge, networks, trades, goods and services that may then lead to longer-term networks (Duffy and Mair, 2018a).

Tourism research has closely examined how many festivals focus on a repertoire of traditional elements that have taken place for years or even generations, and form a symbolic representation and affirmation of the identity of a given community (Gibson and Connell, 2005). As these studies demonstrate, such festivals recreate and celebrate a feeling of connection to place and people, although they also offer a space where such identities can be challenged (Quinn, 2003). Yet, tourism research has also demonstrated the strategic importance of festivals, with newer often instrumentally constructed events by local government or other organisations established for their economic impact, as well as to instil or reinforce a particular notion of (geographically) local community (Picard, 2015). Yet, as research demonstrates, this reading of the festival needs care, for the hosting of such events is also significant for its encouragement of creativity and experimental approaches that help to enrol individuals and groups into a sense of (new or revised) community (Edensor, 2018; Edensor and Sumartojo, 2018). As Duffy and Mair (2018: 4) highlight, ‘festival events are much more than simply a source of financial gain; rather, the processes of festivals enable notions of place, community, identity and belonging to be to some extent actively negotiated, questioned and experienced’. Thus, while festival studies are significant to deeper understandings of the ties and connections between people and place, recent festival research addresses Franklin and Crang’s (2001: 6) criticism of ‘a restricted vision of tourism as a series of discrete, localised events, where destinations, seen as bounded localities, are subject to external forces producing impacts’.

One important avenue of research carefully unpacks the ways festivals are interpellated into public life, examining the influences and effects of festivals as they extend beyond their temporal and spatial boundaries, a process called festivalisation (Roche, 2011). As Roche (2011) points out, festivalisation helps to shape communal notions of identity and belonging through the collective understanding of space, time and agency. Rather than concentrating on the ways that festivals are extra-ordinary (Falassi, 1987), researchers are becoming more interested in how festivals are normative and sometimes transformative processes (Giorgi and Sassatelli, 2011; Rowen, 2020), and as political mechanisms that help constitute individual feelings of acceptance and belonging within an imagined, collective sense of community (Duffy and Mair, 2018). However, the notion of belonging is complex and problematic. The sense of belonging created through festival participation relates to connection with particular ways of being, or particular collective identities (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Yet, we can belong in so many different ways, which are exacerbated by our global and local mobility, that trying to define one way of being that resonates with everyone is doomed to failure. Indeed, the creative ways in which people have responded in trying to alleviate the sense of isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic, especially through connection offered by social media, readily demonstrates this (e.g. Pentreath, 2020; Rifaat, 2020). Instead, local communities become places where issues of difference and the Other are played out in the public sphere. While community festivals in particular can be highly successful in creating a sense of belonging for a dominant population or grouping, others (such as migrant and diasporic groups) may feel excluded (Duffy and Mair, 2018). Such exclusion is not limited to cultural or ethnic identity. Key areas of diversity also include gender, disability, generation, LGBTQIA+, Indigenous identities, and religious affiliation. Festival researchers continue to demonstrate the role such events play for our diverse communities, and their use in promoting social sustainability and equity for all (Hassanli et al., 2020). Thus, there remains a need to continue problematising and critically engaging with such ideas and practices, and facilitate the use of festivals as sites for on-going dialogue and negotiation between members of diverse communities (Finkel and Platt, 2020; Hassanli et al., 2020; Permezel and Duffy, 2007).

Conceptual framings and methodological approaches

An important critique Franklin and Crang (2001) made in this journal’s first issue was an acknowledged paucity of tourism theory and a lack of rigorous testing of the wide variety of conceptual and theoretical approaches that have been brought into tourism research. Since then, tourism studies have been enlivened by exciting new theoretical and methodological approaches that open up new directions for festival research. Although not an exhaustive list, we focus on two research trajectories that we suggest offer important insight into understanding festivals as tourism practices: first, mobilities, and second, a conceptual grouping around affect, emotion, bodies, and the senses.

The new mobilities paradigm offers ways to rethink contemporary life in terms of ‘complex assemblages between these different mobilities that may make and maintain social connections across varied and multiple distances’ (Urry, 2008: 13). By bringing together ideas from the sciences, social sciences and humanities, mobilities scholars examine the impacts of movement at multiple spatial and temporal scales, be that of people, beliefs, thinking, technologies, and even viruses (Sheller and Urry, 2006; Söderström et al., 2013). Of interest to current scholars, severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS was then cause for concern). These ideas resonate with Franklin and Crang’s (2001: 8) observation that we are now perhaps better attuned to the ‘the extraordinary everyday’, whereby ‘most people are now alerted to, and routinely excited by, the flows of global cultural materials all around them in a range of locations and settings. Thus, festivals are possible sites through which a sense of belonging can emerge out of a variety of activities, networks, processes, relations, as well as aesthetic practices through which identity and belonging are performed (de Dios, 2020; Duffy and Mair, 2018; Jamieson and Todd, 2020). This framing will continue to offer scholars working in tourism productive avenues for critically examining festivals and events as part of relations and networks that consist of people, places, and politics ‘at the myriad conjunctures in which they collide’ (Hannam et al., 2016: 2).

Yet, as Gorman-Murray and Nash (2014: 623) point out, a new mobilities paradigm also raises issues of immobility and stasis, and a tendency ‘to focus on either “place making” and “territories” or “movement” and “mobility”’ (italics in original). They suggest a more appropriate framing of contemporary movement is in terms of ‘mooring’ (Gorman-Murray and Nash, 2014: 624) as a means to integrate the ‘incessant movement of mobile things—bodies, materials, ideas—that interconnect to create the spaces of everyday life’ (Gorman-Murray and Nash, 2014: 625). Such a probing into how contemporary life is lived and experienced cuts to the heart of much festival research, because this offers ways to conceptualise the festival ‘as networked within an assemblage that comprises mobility and various forms of stasis, [and] can better capture the fluidity of community formation and processes of identity and identification’ (Duffy and Mair, 2018: 53). Indeed, thinking through a mobilities lens helps subvert assumptions of festivals as localised, static place-making activities, and lends itself to research on nomadic sites, such as ‘the mobile experiential environment of a cruise ship’ that intensifies the ‘visceral and hedonistic experience’ of the festival event (Cashman, 2017: 246) thus helping uncover the heightened experiences of attending festivals. These experiential, temporal and physical encounters are not simply about how people, ideas, things, and so on are connected but also how this varied movement impacts on the bodies, places, actions, and even feelings of individuals and communities that then go on to shape our social world (Duffy and Mair, 2018). The new mobilities paradigm offers festival researchers a means to critically unpack ‘the embodied nature and experience of different modes of travel, seeing these modes in part as forms of material and sociable dwelling-in-motion, places of and for various activities’ (Hannam et al., 2016: 4). As with Gorman-Murray and Nash’s (2014) notion of moorings, thinking of the festival event in terms of mobilities emphasises the importance of various forms of movement not as an ‘undifferentiated flow’ but ‘instead as a series of identifiable activities’ (Hannam et al., 2016: 2) that connect individuals and groups into a location or community. The new mobilities paradigm therefore also brings to the study of festivals an attention to bodily movement within a broader mobility framework that has informed new directions in research. Future directions may perhaps be informed by considering how critical mobilities studies brings to the challenges of diversity and belonging a focus on those diverse mobile entities considered as problematic, therefore not only the movement of people and ideas but also phenomena: ‘the mobilities of money laundering, the drug trade, sewage and waste, infections, urban crime, asylum seeking, arms trading, people smuggling, slave trading, and urban terrorism’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 220; Söderström et al., 2013).

Capturing festival experiences

Festival research has often sought to investigate the impact of festival events on individuals and communities beyond that of simply economics; that there is something significant to a better understanding of the embodied, performative, and non-discursive ways that constitute the ‘elusory nature of the everyday world’ (Cadman, 2009: 456). The generation of strong, often spontaneous feelings of connectedness arise out of the participants’ responses to sensual and embodied responses aroused by the visual, oral, olfactory and haptic elements of an event. These responses are a significant part of the process of sociality, and a ‘successful’ festival is often defined as one that brings about a feeling of togetherness, a collective joy that transforms individuals into a community (Ehrenreich, 2007). A focus on the ways in which such bodily experiences constitute bonds of social connectedness is a fundamental part of the emotional, affective and sensual dimensions of festivals. Indeed as Waitt and Duffy (2010: 458) argue, ‘festival spaces may create an affective ambience that encourages an openness to others, and sustain a social identification through the intangible feeling that encompasses an emotional space of belonging together. A turn to emotion, affect and embodiment has offered opportunities to critically explore the senses (Duffy and Mair, 2018; Edensor and Falconer, 2011; Fincher and Iveson, 2008; see also Everingham et al., 2021), which are the difficult yet taken-for-granted aspects of engaging with and in festival events. Such approaches include a focus on sound, listening and hearing (Waitt and Duffy, 2010), emotion and affect (Chalip, 2006; Duffy, 2014), and bodily movement (Duffy et al., 2011).

Festival scholars have sought to gain access to these qualitative materials through a variety of methodological approaches, and more recent research explores exciting developments in areas such as cultural geography, dance research, and arts-based practices. One especially strong research trajectory draws on non-representational theory’s (Thrift, 2008, commonly abbreviated to NRT; see also discussion around the more-then-representational, Lorimer, 2005) conceptualisation of the body, affect and the unfolding of an event because of its strong resonance with concepts associated with festivals such as communitas, liminality, carnivalesque and festivalisation. NRT is useful for understanding these aspects of the festival because of the interest in emergent practices, ‘an attention to events and the new potentialities for being, doing and thinking that events may bring forth’ (Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 19). This open-ended framing focuses on the process or the unfolding of events (Cadman, 2009), and thus is also aligned with ideas originating in the mobilities literature (Lorimer, 2007). While NRT’s emphasis on practice can be difficult in the act of doing research because of its focus ‘on forms of experience and movement that are not only or never cognitive’ (Nash, 2000: 655), nonetheless, it offers important ways to reveal various non-cognitive and non-verbal aspects of a festival experience. Tourism scholars are taking up the opportunities NRT offers as a means to (re)consider how we engage, interact, and even dwell in tourist spaces (e.g. Prince, 2019), so offering a fertile means to add richness to exploring festival experiences. In addition, scholars have begun to question assumed practices for collecting qualitative data, arguing for ways to think differently and find ways to move beyond the conventions associated with interview methods (Boyd, forthcoming; Hitchings and Latham, 2019). Instead, what these scholars propose are methodological approaches able to capture emerging situations, which requires a somewhat radical shift in thinking. Examples include the work of Manning and Massumi (2014), who suggest you ‘start by doing something and see where it takes you’ (Boyd, forthcoming: 6, italics in original), or the work of WalkingLab (Springgay and Truman, 2019) whereby methods emerge in consultation with research participants and can range from sound recordings, photography, storytelling, and play. Approaches such as these offer a deeper, more nuanced ‘reading’ of festivals and contribute to developing theoretical and conceptual frameworks that can capture the multiple, heterogeneous relations and processes that come together to constitute the festival event.

Conclusion

Following on from the departure points for tourism studies offered by Franklin and Crang (2001), we have presented possibilities for festival research that intrigues us, especially as to how future research might move beyond festivals as simply representational practices (as important as this is). There is much work in this field that has produced richer understandings of festivals as tourism practices and processes, as Franklin and Crang had hoped. Nonetheless, tourism studies continue to be enriched by new directions occurring in a range of disciplines, as we have noted with respect to festivals.

We have presented several areas that are ripe for further research, particularly given the tumultuous nature of the world we are living in. Our changing climate will continue to offer challenges (and opportunities) for festivals and will require innovative ways to re-think the festival in light of a range of unstoppable forces. Some festivals have become leading lights in this area. For example, Glastonbury Festival (UK), Woodford Folk Festival (Australia) and the Burning Man Festival (USA) are excellent examples of how to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change (Mair, 2020). They have done this primarily through investment in sustainable practices and infrastructure, although in each case, the festivals already had a strong sustainability ethos and values. However, there is still a lack of research into how we might normalise the incorporation of climate-related risks into the long term strategic plans of other festivals.

While ‘tourism is populated by hybrids’ (ibid, p. 15), this continues to reinvigorate our research, for ‘these hybrids also serve then to decentre tourism, highlighting elements such as off-site markers, expectations and memories. Tourism stops being parcelled away into discrete places and times and becomes distended and distantiated’ (Franklin and Crang, 2001: 16). Technology offers us a variety of solutions that allow us to experience (at least in part) some of the performative elements of festive events; however, it cannot (as yet) replace the physical or embodied elements of attendance. Social media allows us to connect with others, albeit virtually, and this helps to mitigate some of the potential negative aspects of virtual attendance. However, the chaos wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, including the mass cancellations of festivals and other public events, has brought into sharp focus the importance of a range of intangible concepts such as belonging, togetherness and communitas. Festivals have always been about coming together – in celebration, in devotion, in commemoration or as a community amongst other reasons – and the impacts of this togetherness are almost immeasurable, both in the literal and figurative senses of the word. If there is a small positive to take away from the global pandemic, it is that it has forced us to recognise and re-evaluate the importance of simply being with other people. Festivals offer an unsurpassed opportunity to facilitate this. Festivals – and a range of associated events such as fairs, street parties, carnivals and parades – are widely acknowledged as important communal activities that provide ‘temporary escapes from the mundane nature of everyday routines’ (Finkel and Platt, 2020: e12498), that assist in the construction of particular social and political identities, as well as a form of commodity that brings into the community social and economic capital (Duffy, 2019).

What Franklin and Crang (2001) offered were exciting new directions for tourism that have underpinned much of the festival research undertaken in the last two decades. These directions will continue to inform not only scholarship within festival research but also provide significant input into the reconstruction of communities and places as we find ourselves attempting to make sense of a world in the grip of a global pandemic, still coming to terms with the urgent need to address the climate crisis, as well as concerns about the increase of political polarisation within democratic societies. Much has changed in the 20 years since the inception of Tourist Studies, but festivals remain resilient – they will re-emerge in future, perhaps not unscathed but with a renewed sense of purpose.