Abstract

Can activism be considered a leisure activity? Can the Occupy movement, local campaigns for change and lone acts of personal resistance be understood as events?

Within the field of Events Management the content of events is generally analyzed within three categories—culture, sport or business. Such a typology can be helpful as a heuristic for interpretation and analysis within a commercial paradigm. However, this framework overlooks and depoliticizes a significant variety of events, those more accurately construed as protest.

Protests as Events is the first book to explore activism as a leisure activity and protests as events; using a fresh interpretation of event to develop a new critical politics of events and leisure. Bringing together a range of cutting edge research from around the world, it explores a variety of protests through the lens of events studies and leisure in order to understand how the study of events management might be conceptualized in the protest space.

This volume is a much needed and timely addition to the emerging literature on critical events studies. The book responds to fundamental epistemological questions around what constitutes an event and how, as researchers and students, we must challenge neoliberal-centric narratives of them. From raves to Occupy movements this book presents a diverse collection which will kick-start those debates. The volume highlights the trans-disciplinary nature of events studies and has the potential to develop thought-provoking and radical avenues for events management education and research.
Louise Platt, Senior Lecturer in Tourism and Events Management, Liverpool John Moore's University
Ian Lamond is lecturer of events management at Leeds Metropolitan University. His research is concerned with the working practices of social movements and how such movements respond to policy change. His work has been presented at several international conferences—spanning disciplines such as political science; political communication, policy studies, critical tourism studies and critical discourse analysis.

Karl Spracklen is Professor of leisure studies at Leeds Metropolitan University. He teaches leisure theory, popular culture; philosophy and sociology of sports science, as well as research methods and dissertation support, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, across the School. He has published widely in the area of leisure studies with works including "Leisure, Sport and Society" (2013), "Whiteness and Leisure" (2013), "Constructing Leisure, Historical and Philosophical Debates" (2011) and "Habermas and the Meaning of Leisure" (2009) all with Palgrave Macmillan.


This Protest as Events book comes at a timely juncture in the evolution of the event management field. Until now this field has been dominated by a concern with the operational and logisitical but this book marks a shift in emphasis towards shaping a distinctly critical event studies where the very notion of what an event represents is open to critique. Formal political protests, everyday opposition to issues of social importance and online dissent are all covered in the this text. Furthermore its call to researchers to be explicit about their political and ethical commitments lays the foundation for a radical new way of seeing and understanding events.

David McGillivray, Chair of Event and Digital Cultures, University of the West of Scotland