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.

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.