This document discusses the relationship between universities and cultural festivals. It notes that universities are increasingly partnering with festivals as part of their public engagement and knowledge exchange agendas. However, universities are also facing budget pressures that make them more exclusive and corporate. The document considers different perspectives on what festivals represent, from temporary spaces of freedom to opportunities for resistance or commercial recuperation. It raises questions about the role of universities in festivals and how collaborations might enable public cultural programming or risk being co-opted by market forces.

1. Universities and festivals:
thinking critically about cultural production
Laura Ager
Universities, Cities and Transformation:
Practices of Cultural Intermediation and Expectations of Knowledge
Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, 2nd September 2014

5. Breakdown of what festival goers expect to pay for a
UK festival
£423.01:
£103.66 on a ticket
£80.02 on food and drink
£71.61 on camping gear
£60.70 on transport
£49.67 on wet weather gear
£57.35 on festival fashion and dress-up
source: http://www.gigwise.com/news/81652/young-people-unable-to-attend-festivals-due-to-average-spend-
of-%C2%A3420

6. Festivals that have a UK university
as a strategic partner
no single discipline, a field at the intersection of existing research fields:
universities and the knowledge-based economy
sociology / cultural studies
creative entrepreneurship / cultural political economy
cultural geography / urban studies
festival studies / event management / tourism

9. source: totally stolen from Flickr

24. universities relying more on fees and external resources
universities becoming more exclusive (student fees)
becoming more like other corporate bodies?
managerialism and governance mechanisms
over-regulated – contradictory policies
measurement indices and academic targets
disciplines under threat

25. positive aspects
people! - lots of them, disciplinary communities of practice
cultural assets & space for cultural programming
original creative work, research outputs
social networks, existing partnerships,
a history of extra-mural missions & engagement
universities are all different and are changing – dynamic field
disciplines under threat are fighting back?

26. WHY?
‘third’ missions - public engagement agenda
placemaking - urban competitiveness
policy-related reasons - KE, REF, impact agenda
…...a set of ‘enabling’ conditions?
HOW?
collaborations, informal networks and shared activities
entrepreneurial & social infrastructures

27. the intermediaries:
‘taste-maker’ / legislator
a legitimating authority
curation as a methodology
professional praxis
public cultural campus
social & cultural capital
cultural entrepreneur
a ‘boundary spanner’ or enabler
aesthetics, cultural production
creative response to consumption
serendipity, networks, access
… & also social and cultural capital

28. Does it make sense?
Depends on your view of a
festival….

29. Village Feast. 19th century reproduction of 16th century woodcut
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival

31. An ‘absence of footlights’ - no
division between performer and
spectator
a temporary social space,
characterised by freedom, equality
and abundance
a 'spectacle without a stage', a
communal performance
free and familiar contact between 'the
people'
the ‘traditions of the oppressed’
a challenge to officialdom and
oppressiveness – a metaphor for
resistance in Russia during the Stalin
era
The theatre, which seems and claims to
bring us together, in fact disperses and
atomizes us.
spectatorship is by its very nature
passive
the festival involves every spectator
becoming an active participant
spectatorship is suspended, the
difference is between sympathy and
empathy
romantic folk festival and French
revolutionary festivals
a ‘safety-valve’ for society

32. A book launch / talk delivered in a tent
at Green Man festival 2013
"a psychedelic history of Britain“
places the origins of Glastonbury festival
in 1960s counter culture
LSD was legal for a number of years in
the UK
people trying to evade, experiment, and
escape
image source:
http://www.optimo.co.uk/books-2012/

33. Burning man festival 2014 – ‘Caravansary’

34. Does the university have
any control over this?

39. interviewing festival producers / organisers:
what was the catalyst?
what are your objectives / influences?
the meaning of the texts & the discourses represented?
how are they selected, arranged, mediated?
what is the platform?
what is your role?
what are the advantages of participation?

40. The theory bit…..
from Bourriaud - relational aesthetics, the crossing of a
threshold, dialogue, being ‘up for a more speculative game’
from Habermas, via McGuigan - public cultural sphere,
communicative practices, democratic citizenship
from Ranciere - an egalitarian politics
from Lévi-Strauss – bricolage, do-it-yourself
from Deleuze - assemblage, power, deterritorialisation?
…theories of resistance, gaining purchase, (change?)

41. The other view…..
capital is finding new territory to break open
the university as an ‘academic recuperation machine’
reterritorialisation, new assemblages to accommodate
or more pragmatically….
Bourdieu’s (1991) concept of ‘working dissensus’
continuous struggle over symbolic power

42. @LIFFlaura
l.c.ager@edu.Salford.ac.uk