Abstracts for Session 31

Advancements in Event & Festival Research 

 

 

Title: The challenges of creating destination narrative through free-to-attend events

Authors: Tim Brown and Claire Eason-Bassett

Affiliation: University of Chester, University of Northampton

 

There are many examples of public, free-to-attend events forming a central part of destination management programmes with the intention of creating the destination narrative, attracting visitors and building the profile of a specific location.  However, these events frequently exist in a precarious and challenging balance of safety, resourcing and stakeholder expectations.

Community events have always been a cornerstone of local life (Getz & Page, 2020; Ferdinand & Kitchen, 2017; Shone & Parry, 2019), but these events have evolved significantly in recent years and have become annual traditions and part of the wider destination calendar.  The communities around the event expect the event to happen, that they will be able to attend without charge and that it will be a safe and enjoyable experience. For these events, the tangible challenge is ensuring safety within the financial resources available, particularly when public funding is minimal.  

This session will explore our research using festive case studies from Cornwall and Chester into the balancing act that free-to-attend events have to achieve, considering effective safety management, efficient resourcing (including skills and knowledge), and managing the expectations of stakeholders.  We will propose tools and approaches for achieving the balance and sustainably developing these events.

The impact of free-to-attend events is significant in terms of profile, community engagement, local economic impact, and in creating the destination brand. To conclude, we will consider how destinations can capitalise on these benefits and mitigate the challenges through collaboration, skill development, resourcing and strategic risk analysis.

 

 

Title: An exploration of lasting festival experiences using self-recorded shared memory conversations

Authors: Maarit Kinnunen, Emma Wood, Yanning Li, and Jonathan Moss

Affiliation: University of Lapland, Leeds Beckett University, University of Surrey

 

Our aim was to explore the differences between individual memories and those negotiated with peers. A better understanding of how memories evolve through sharing and the meaning of these to the sharer has important implications for event marketing and experience. This paper critiques the novel methods used in the study.

Participants recruited a friend with whom they had attended the same festival. They were asked to self-record their individual memories and then record a paired conversation where they shared their memories. 

The method provided privileged access to often intimate memories that would not normally be shared with researchers. The paired conversations produced self-perpetuating flowing narratives.

Participant recruitment was challenging. In Finland, 796 emails were sent to get 14 pairs, 43% of whom dropped out. In the UK, 12 of the 250 festival-goers contacted agreed to take part, but only 4 pairs completed the tasks. In China, 100 emails gained only 2 pairs with others recruited through social media and snowballing. A minor challenge was that participants felt uncomfortable talking to themselves for the individual recording. 

The benefits in gaining in-depth material, largely uninfluenced by the researchers, far outweighed the limitations. The method also overcame the fieldwork challenges created by the Covid pandemic since neither the participants nor the researchers needed to meet.

Our next steps are to do justice to this emotion-rich highly personal data. Our initial analysis already shows links to the literature on memory malleability, memory synchronisation and the influence of shared memory on attitudes and behaviour.

 


Title: Nature Impacts from a Participant Sports Event – Preliminary Results from a Swedish Mountain Marathon.

Authors: Axel Eriksson

Affiliation: Mid-Sweden University

 

Recreational leisure has recently gone towards characteristic of sports. Previously considered nature visit was without any competition, recreation in nature changes to be an experience with competitiveness. Participate in sports events has become one means to experience nature and landscapes and visit new places. While outdoor recreation research extensively covered nature from high visitor numbers and different activities, the direct effect on nature from these new emerging organized events is less researched. It calls to understand what the impacts are and how they are perceived. The study case is the annual weekly KIA mountain marathon, with nine races and around 1000 participants. The races cross landscape used by many actors and inhabitants; a living space, rain deer grazing land, nature reserves, and more. The study takes two perspectives. One is through interviews and observations to understand the experience of impact from the local population and stakeholders. The event short but impactful occasion illustrates what sustainability deem important for them. The second is from the participates. With photo-elicitation, the participants are asked to capture their imprint on nature, capturing both the experience and describing the impact considered important, and reflect on how they can act in nature. In the data collection in June and August, the preliminary result is presented.

 

 

Title: Paradox of the spectacle: Western tourists’ simulated experience of Asian cultural performances

Authors: Asif Ijaz and Frank Lindberg

Affiliation: Nord University Business School

 

This article contributes to explore and discuss Asian weddings as an emerging tourists’ attraction and destination for Western tourists who travel to experience culture-based performances in Asia. Weddings are well-known as religious ceremonies, nevertheless, wedding rituals are now being marketed as enchanted cultural experiences that can provide deep immersion and transformative experience. Previous research argues that crossing-culture experiences are stressful and overwhelming, however, our findings from empirical data from paid- and un-paid (invited) tourists show how Asian weddings become a Western spectacle because it is resumed as an enchanted festive moment which is simultaneously real and imagined. We can therefore find contemporary evidence of weddings as traditional archaic, modern and postmodern spectacle – at the same time, however with varying symbolic value. We discuss the paradoxes of the spectacle and the consequences for tourism when religious rituals turn into cultural performances.

 

Keywords: Spectacular consumption; crossing-culture experience; culture-based performances, weddings; paradoxes; immersion; transformation

 

 

Title: The relevance of evaluation models for legacy of events used by a regional tourism office.

Authors: Tommy Andersson, John Armbrecht, Henrik Jutbring, and Erik Lundberg

Affiliation: University of Gothenburg

 

Event legacy, defined as long-term impacts on the society after the closure of an event, are important for event organizers to justify the existence and legitimacy of events. The local population and politicians often base their support or resistance to an event on the assumed future legacy of the event.

Various models and evaluation schemes have been proposed by academics (Andersson, 2019, Chappelet 2012, Gratton & Preuss, 2008) based on empirical evidence from predominantly large events and mega events.

This study has a focus on small events in a Swedish rural area and the objective is to discuss event evaluation schemes used by the regional destination management office in relation to evaluation schemes developed internationally by academics. 

Particular attention will be given to environmental effects, the sustainability of an event and the process to develop evaluation schemes in rural contexts.

The evaluation schemes presently used by the regional destination management office include “The Funnel” and a developed version called “The Sustainable Funnel”. Another scheme used is “The Sustainability Step Forwards” developed by the national tourism organization. The academic alternatives are based on Andersson, 2019, Chappelet 2012 as well as Gratton & Preuss, 2008.

The discussion and conclusions raise issues related to sustainability, scope of analysis and a proactive process of event planning to consider legacy already from the beginning of planning an event.

 

 

Title: Building Resilient Event Sector in Times of Uncertainty 

Authors: Luiza Ossowska, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, Marianna Strzelecka, Dorota Janiszewska, Dariusz Kloskowski, and Ove Oklevik 

Affiliation: Koszalin University of Technology

 

COVID-19 has led to a lockdown of local, regional and even national economies for months. Numerous business and social activities have stopped completely or slowed down, in some cases for months. Event sector is one of the most severely affected leisure industries. It continues to suffer from COVID-19 restrictions coupled with people’s fear to interact and changing preferences of how people spend their leisure time. 

Saving the event sector requires a better understanding of its problems, whereas increasing its resilience through targeted solutions is mandatory. This can be difficult as the COVID19 pandemic created fear of face-to-face interaction, putting independent, smaller, and non-commercial events are at risk of closure due to high costs and low-profit margins. 

Against this background, the proposed study will provide insights into event sector sustainability by discussing sources of resilience and transition towards the post-pandemic context of Poland. The study rationale lies in the need of an up-to-date knowledge and knowledge-based tailored solutions to build resilient event ecosystems in the new reality. 

Because resilience is a forward-looking concept that helps explore policy options for dealing with uncertainty and change. For events sector, resilience can act as a catalyst for change and transformation, allowing those event systems to reinvent themselves in the new post-covid19 realities. Such resilience is more than a system's capacity to recover to the state that existed before the disturbance, and in fact, it can advance the ‘system’ through learning and adaptation. 

This research draws on this theoretical insight from Cutler et al. (2008) to conceptualize event resilience as the intersection of three core characteristics: resilience, adaptability, and transformability.

We used a mix-methodological approach, that combines quantitative data (200 surveys) with qualitative insight (15 interviews). The work is currently in progress, and the first general conclusions are that the event sector resilience depends on organizers’ creativity, cooperation and passion.

 

 

Title: Time to get the ball rolling - Sports and outdoor events as drivers for immigrants’ social integration

Authors: Parisa Setoodegan, Lusine Margaryan and Robert Pettersson 

Affiliation: ETOUR Mid Sweden University

 

In the recent years, integration of immigrants has become an urgent issue in the Nordic countries. Given the importance of outdoor recreation and events for the Nordic societies, it can be assumed that engaging in these activities is an important step towards social integration. There is a long tradition of international research and accumulation of longitudinal data on trends on outdoor recreation and events in the Nordics. Similarly, there is abundance of international research focusing on integration and sports. However, involvement of immigrants in outdoor recreation and events beyond sports has not received sufficient research attention and has largely remained a ‘blind spot’. In this article, we present a study aiming at understanding how outdoor recreation and events can be used as drivers for social integration of immigrants. The article is at the theoretical intersection of migration, integration and the role of sports and outdoor events in immigrant integration. The empirical material is based on nineteen semi-structured interviews conducted with immigrants in Jämtland County, Sweden. While the results corroborate previous research that sport and outdoor events provide a potential arena for social integration, it is also evident that citizens of immigrant background face a range of internal and external barriers on the way to start actively engaging in these activities. More research is needed to support both participants and event organizers in creating and engaging in more inclusive and accessible outdoor recreation and events.

 

Keywords: Sports, outdoors, events, immigrants, social integration.