Accessibility, Inclusion, and Diversity in Critical Event Studies

Rebecca Finkel, Briony Sharp, Majella Sweeney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351142229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Most early social research into planned events had the effect of broadcasting narratives of dominant cultures and privileged groups. More recently, however, convergences of gender, sexualities, ethnicities, age, class, religion, and intersectional analyses and events studies have started to drive new critical understanding of the impacts of events on non-mainstream, non-majority communities around the globe. This timely book addresses current gaps in the literature surrounding issues of accessibility, inclusion, and diversity in various event landscapes.

Structured into four parts covering the main types of events, the chapters present original topics using innovative methodological approaches. Each chapter employs a case study to illustrate the key intertwining issues in these various experiential realms. Further, the chapters are all cross- or interdisciplinary, drawing on gender, sexualities, cultural, race/ethnicity studies as well as multiple literatures that feed into critical events studies and exploring a variety of global examples.

This significant book opens the path to further research on the role and importance of accessibility, inclusion, and diversity in events environments worldwide. It will be of interest to academics and researchers of critical event studies as well as a number of related social science disciplines.

Part I

Festivals and fairs

1 Addressing community diversity

The role of the festival encounter

Michelle Duffy, Judith Mair, and Gordon Waitt

Introduction

We live in a world in which the movement of people is unprecedented; yet, there are significant discrepancies in this mobility. Majority world individuals and communities often need to move in response to local and global challenges, such as political upheaval, human rights abuses, concerns around water and food security, the impacts of climate change, and the desire to seek better outcomes for themselves and their families. In contrast, the mobility of members of the minority world – with the increased wealth, health and life expectancies of its members – is most often tied to lifestyle choices. And while technology has enabled greater connectivity across the globe, this is not without concern. As Fincher, et al. (2014: 3) remind us, in the ‘age of migration’ (Castles and Miller 2009), the question of whether some urban inhabitants’ ethnic and racialised identities are stigmatised, trivialised, valued, or recognised in relation to others, is a crucial element of social justice in the city.

Questions are again being raised about the strength of social cohesion in western nations, such as contemporary Australia (e.g. Forrest and Dunn 2010), particularly with regard to so-called radicalisation of disaffected youth (Grossman and Tahiri 2015). However, diversity has broader meaning than simply that of ethnic, cultural, or national identity. Identity and notions of belonging are also constituted through particular ideas within a society about gender, class, sexuality, age, and able-bodiedness, which in turn construct an individual’s and community’s feelings of inclusion and connectedness or exclusion and alienation. In terms of social justice, ‘managing’ diversity raises issues about social cohesion and belonging because we need to consider group and community rights and how these relate to individual rights and freedoms. This can be problematic in liberal democratic societies because of an emphasis on individual rights rather than community rights (Capeheart and Milovanovic 2007). Thus, when considering belonging, we are also concerned with the ways in which power is embedded within the relations between people as well as with place.

One popular strategy for creating and/or re-affirming a sense of community has been to generate festival events that serve to create a sense of shared identity and belonging in ways that can encompass difference. What underpins such festivals is the desire to promote social cohesion through discourses of an official ‘imagined’ community; yet, some scholars argue that tension and debate – perhaps better conceptualised as agonism (Mouffe 1994) – play an important role in acknowledging the heterogeneity of contemporary life and thus retain the potential to transform democratic politics. Nonetheless, questions as to who has a right to be a part of ‘the community’ continue.

The starting point for the ideas presented in this chapter is the work of Fincher and Iveson (2008: 146, 175), who argue that the encounter facilitates a “social differentiation without exclusion” where “unscripted encounters” offer opportunities to experience the diversity of communities. Many local governments seek to lessen potentially divisive responses to difference and demonstrate a commitment to creating a welcoming, inclusive and accessible community, often through the creation and staging of community festivals. However, Fincher and Iveson (2008: 146) suggest that the festival offers a means to facilitate exploration and experimentation in the design of our communities, which requires “planning for disorder”. They argue we need to pay attention to the “importance of small-scale, casual and unpredictable encounters” (Fincher and Iveson 2008: 146) because it is through fostering encounters with difference and diversity that we can start to address injustice and inequality.

This chapter draws on data from a range of case study communities and festivals. Each case study employed mixed-qualitative research methods that help uncover how the festival may provide opportunities for such unpredictable encounters. The key methods included semi-structured interviews with key organisers and event participants alongside participant observation. Semi-structured interviews offered possibilities to access the sets of ideas that informed the events through the sharing of stories; whereas, participant observation allowed the researchers to access the experiential dimensions of events that are often beyond words. A combination of discourse, narrative, and affective analysis was employed to interpret what these may mean for thinking about ways to enhance social connectedness and inclusion.

‘Managing’ diversity

Inherent in the development of policy discourse around diversity are questions as to who has the right to the place of the city (Lefebvre 1991; Purcell 2002). Lefebvre (1991) argues that social justice requires a radical rethinking of the city: that the right to the city is embedded within occupying and participating in the life of the city, and is not an intrinsic right associated only with the ownership of property and capital. As Purcell (2002: 102) points out,

under the right to the city, membership in the community of enfranchised people is not an accident of nationality or ethnicity or birth; rather it is earned by living out the routines of everyday life in the space of the city.

Therefore, the city is not simply a passive stage on which social life unfolds; rather, the city is constituted through civic, material, cultural, and social processes. Underpinning much of the literature examining social relations in public space is a focus on how a proximity to strangers in this shared space may facilitate some understanding and acceptance of otherness (as observed in work on cosmopolitanism, hospitality, new urban citizenship, and urban planning; see for example, Amin 2002; Bell 2007; Iveson 2007; Laurier and Philo 2006; Wilson 2011). Policies that seek to manage diversity have approached this by attempting to “manage public space in ways that build sociality and civic engagement out of the encounter between strangers” (Amin 2008: 6). Managing difference through processes that seek to construct a sense of community has in some instances reframed social cohesion and connectedness as “as a logical ‘solution’ to a growing number of social ills and/or the ‘target’ of urban policy interventions” (MacLeavy 2008: 541). However, critiques of such a formulation of policy argue that this approach pathologises difference, and, rather than enabling or encouraging diversity, this framework actually reproduces and disguises relationships of power.

A “geographies of encounter” has focused on documenting how individuals negotiate social diversity, urban difference, and prejudice in everyday life (Wilson 2016). However, as Wilson (2016) points out, there has been little critical examination as to how the concept of encounter is mobilised in policy and practice, apart from the notion that “low-level sociality and banal everyday civilities have enduring effects” (Valentine and Sadgrove 2012: 2050; see also Laurier and Philo 2006). In this framework,

[t]he freedom to associate and mingle in cafés, parks, streets, shopping malls, and squares is linked to the development of an urban civic culture based on the freedom and pleasure to linger, the serendipity of casual encounter and mixture, the public awareness that these are shared spaces.

(Amin 2002: 967)

Yet, as Amin goes on to discuss, this framing of chance encounters in the public sphere is problematic. Visibility and proximity may encourage interaction because of a pragmatic need to accommodate difference, but this does not then translate into respect for others (Valentine 2008). While unscripted encounters may encourage certain forms of civil behaviour (Buonfino and Mulgan 2007), this is not the same as generating respect for difference or for greater openness to diversity (Gawlewicz 2015). Hence, simply being co-present in public space fails to lead on to challenging individual and community assumptions about certain individuals and groups, and thus enable communities to reconcile various notions of difference (Amin 2002; Duffy and Mair 2018).

Nevertheless, a common approach to addressing such ideas about diversity in public space has been through the hosting of community festivals, where it is hoped that opportunities to engage with difference within the relatively ‘safe’ framework of a festive event may lessen potentially divisive responses to difference and demonstrate a commitment to creating a welcoming, inclusive, and accessible community. Thus, festivals are significant to a politics of belonging because of the ways in which they are utilised as a common framework for community celebration and for reinvigorating notions of a shared community (Duffy and Mair 2018; Jepson and Clarke 2015). Part of the challenges of incorporating festivals into policy is that within this framework, the term ‘community’ is popularly understood as being those people, usually of a specific locale, who share a set of values and social relations characterised by personal connections. The community festival is a common framework for reinvigorating notions of a shared community, wherein difference may be celebrated but the focus is on commonality (Jepson and Clarke 2015). The official discourse of those groups controlling the festival operate to produce an ‘imagined’ community, which the festival is then planned to encapsulate and promote. In this framework, the imperative of community-oriented festival is localism – that is, a celebration of the unique qualities of people and place forged by histories and geographies (del Barrio, et al. 2012; Duffy and Mair 2018; Jaeger and Mykletun 2013; van Winkle, et al. 2014) or in generating new place-based forms of identification (Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993; Picard 2015).

Yet, while the concept of community is central to policy and planning approaches, such frameworks in practice need to contend with often markedly high social difference that produce sites of “throwntogetherness” (Massey 2005: 11). What is meant by belonging or social connectedness, therefore, raises important questions about how we understand community. As Massey (1994: 121) explains, the identity of a community or a place is about “the specificity of interaction with other places.” However, feelings of attachment to a community is not simply about being and remaining in place. Rather, belonging creates a sense of connection in particular ways or to particular collective identities, and these attachments and identities are embedded within the narratives that people tell about themselves as a community (Yuval-Davis 2006). That said, such notions of belonging can also be problematic because of the sorts of identities or social relations invoked by a festival theme (Cornish 2015; Jodie 2015). Festivals are, therefore, complex sites of community building. In considering the role festivals may play in the process of individual and collective belonging, we need to acknowledge that communities are not homogenous. Possibilities for conflict arise from competing narratives that inform who (and what) constitutes a place or a community. In addition, as Young (2008: 4–5) argues, we need to critically explore the relationships between planning practice and the dimensions of culture that inhere in communities and their ways of life, in history and intangible heritage, and in environments. In the absence of this, planning may continue to languish in political, ethical, and strategic terms, while culture continues to exhibit heightened diversity and dynamism and a rising potential tapped by the cultural economy and exploited in the processes of cultural commodification.

Young (2008) cautions us as to the increasing commodification of culture and its incorporation into planning practice, particularly as this often fails to capture the complex, dynamic, and subtle nature of what culture is. He also points to disparities in terms of whose culture is valued, noting a “global pattern” that generally favours white, middle-class, male, heterosexual, urban, and settler culture over that of less powerful groups including women, sexual minorities, Indigenous groups, non-urban communities, and those cultures arising out of diverse and intercultural groups (Young 2008: 7). In the ways these patterns of cultural hegemony shape the distribution of power, these unequal relations are most often re-inscribed in social and material relations that serve to reinforce social injustice (Young 2008).

A potential means for planning and policy to critically engage more with encounter is to consider socia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Festivals and fairs
• Part II. Cultural and political events
• Part III. Sporting events
• Part IV. Conferences
• Index