1st Edition
Events and Infrastructures Critical Interrogations
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 and 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
Barbara Grabher and Ian R. Lamond
Part 1. Infrastructuring Space
Introduction: Infrastructuring Space
Barbara Grabher
2. Revisiting the Spatial Relationships Between Mega-Events and Host Cities
Zachary M. Jones
3. Interrogating Event-Induced but Underused Infrastructures: The White Elephants of Spanish Mega-Events Linked to the Neoliberal Urbanism of the Recent Decades
Federico Camerin and Rafael Córdoba Hernández
4. The ‘Circus’ is Coming to Town… Literally: Contestation and Conflict Around Formula 1 Street Circuits
Enrico Tommarchi
5. Culture, Cognition, Events, and Infrastructures
Lorenzo Sabetta and Giovanni Zampieri
Part 2. Event Infrastructures as Expressions of in/Equality
Introduction: Event Infrastructures as Expressions of in/Equality
Barbara Grabher
6. Exclusive Expectations: Examining the VIP Experience at UK Music Events
Abigail Beddows and Alex W. Grebenar
7. Infrastructuring an Event. FemIT Conf 2021: Diversity and Technology in Argentina
Sol Martinez Demarco
8. Transforming Attitudes through Strategic Infrastructuring: The Tumaini Festival in Malawi’s Dzaleka Refugee Camp
Lisa Gilman
9. The Genesis of a Shared World Through Event Infrastructure: A Phenomenological Investigation of Communitarisation in Shared and Extraordinary Experiences
Georg Harfensteller
Part 3. Events as Infrastructure
Introduction: Events as Infrastructure
Barbara Grabher
10. An Analysis of Multicultural Trends Underlying the Maltese Festa in a Digital Era
Wendy Jo Mifsud, Caldon Mercieca, and Andrea Stegani
11. Events as Infrastructure and Learning Experiences: Exemplified on an Alpine Peripheral Living Lab in Rural Switzerland
Onna Rageth
12. Events as Soft Infrastructure for Urban Development? Learning from the Italian Capital of Culture Initiative
Ignazio Vinci
13. Beyond Control: Critical Reflections on Infrastructure and Events
Sebastiano Citroni
14. Last words? – Unconclusive remarks
Ian R. Lamond
Biography
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). Ian’s 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.
"Events and Infrastructures: Critical Interrogations provides a much overdue interdisciplinary and transnational dialogue about event infrastructures. While it is easy for us in the field of Celebrations and Festive Studies to get caught up in the more spectacular aspects of the events we investigate, as this edited volume’s engaging contributions show, their 'mundane' elements are just as important and can be just as fascinating when analyzed and interrogated critically."
Isabel Machado, University of British Columbia
"Events and Infrastructures: Critical Interrogations provides a timely and nuanced investigation of the role that infrastructures play in the production, experience and significance of events. The international scope and the variety of event types included in the book are particular strengths. The critical nature of the volume is strongly in evidence and adds an important lens to its conceptual and empirical contents. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in critical event studies."
Judith Mair, University of Queensland
"While we have long understood that festivals and events require all kinds of infrastructure in order to function, until recently, the word most likely conjured up images of power cables, crowd barriers and portable toilets. However, as the editors and contributors set about carefully explaining in this volume, infrastructure is actually a highly complex and difficult concept to grasp. With a wide-ranging series of stimulating chapters that suggest different conceptual approaches for thinking about infrastructure as well as empirical chapters that draw on both diverse event contexts and an impressive variety of geographical settings, this new volume critically interrogates event infrastructures. In doing so, it exemplifies the very essence of a critical approach to event studies in its efforts to go beneath the surface and beyond the obvious materialities and manifestations of how events appear to be. Research on the inter-relationships between infrastructure and events is only beginning to emerge and this thought-provoking volume is a much-welcomed publication that can only encourage further interrogation into what the infrastructural turn might mean in event contexts."
Bernadette Quinn, Technological University Dublin
