Making Space: Investigating the diversity conundrum for British music festivals
Making Space: Investigating the diversity conundrum for British music festivals
Culture always speaks to the history and meaning of place. Music festivals in particular carry considerable significance as they are produced through spatial and temporal processes that extends their symbolic and material meaning beyond their local settings. The onset of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in Bristol intensified debates about festival diversity. Drawing on interviews with Bristol-based festival producers, this article examines popular music festivals and the places, communities and identities they represent. Rather than repeating the common banal criticism of festivals for being too white, we contribute to the debates by unravelling complex processes embedded within festival production. Using Lefebvre’s concept of conceived space, we argue that (racial) diversity is a spatial conundrum for music festivals. We demonstrate this through the way festival space is conceived: culturally – as it is framed within established music festival discourses; economically – through entrepreneurial networks of independent producers within local music cultures; socially – their ideals (including diversity), tastes and lifestyles inadvertently organise and represent particular symbolic and material formations of (racialised) identities and communities.
Bristol, lefebvre, music festival, racial diversity, racialised spatiality
338-357
Haynes, Jo
356e0d4d-eebd-4245-81e8-1ffb553af645
Mogilnicka, Magda
99b42ae0-17cf-4b08-9962-4ab607e58b13
July 2024
Haynes, Jo
356e0d4d-eebd-4245-81e8-1ffb553af645
Mogilnicka, Magda
99b42ae0-17cf-4b08-9962-4ab607e58b13
Haynes, Jo and Mogilnicka, Magda
(2024)
Making Space: Investigating the diversity conundrum for British music festivals.
Social & Cultural Geography, 25 (2), .
(doi:10.1080/14649365.2022.2152088).
Abstract
Culture always speaks to the history and meaning of place. Music festivals in particular carry considerable significance as they are produced through spatial and temporal processes that extends their symbolic and material meaning beyond their local settings. The onset of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in Bristol intensified debates about festival diversity. Drawing on interviews with Bristol-based festival producers, this article examines popular music festivals and the places, communities and identities they represent. Rather than repeating the common banal criticism of festivals for being too white, we contribute to the debates by unravelling complex processes embedded within festival production. Using Lefebvre’s concept of conceived space, we argue that (racial) diversity is a spatial conundrum for music festivals. We demonstrate this through the way festival space is conceived: culturally – as it is framed within established music festival discourses; economically – through entrepreneurial networks of independent producers within local music cultures; socially – their ideals (including diversity), tastes and lifestyles inadvertently organise and represent particular symbolic and material formations of (racialised) identities and communities.
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Published date: July 2024
Additional Information:
Funding Information: The authors gratefully acknowledge funding support for the project ‘European Music Festivals, Public Spaces, and Cultural Diversity’ (2019–2022) from the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Joint Research Programme ‘Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe’. We also wish to thank the Editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments on an earlier draft. Most importantly, we thank our festival producers for their valuable contribution during a very difficult period. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords:
Bristol, lefebvre, music festival, racial diversity, racialised spatiality
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 496429
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/496429
ISSN: 1464-9365
PURE UUID: 54218814-4de3-4801-9831-4bac9036976d
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Date deposited: 13 Dec 2024 17:34
Last modified: 14 Dec 2024 03:14
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Author:
Jo Haynes
Author:
Magda Mogilnicka
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