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Leisure, Cultural Tourism, Events and the City: Reflections on the work and life of Greg Richards

Events in the network society : the role of pulsar and iterative events

This conceptual article argues for a broader view of the role of events in social systems. When analyzed as social phenomena, events can be seen as social actors that have the potential to both sustain and transform social systems. The maintenance of social systems is often reliant on iterative events, regularly occurring celebrations that tend to confirm social structures. In contrast, pulsar events have the potential to transform social structures. In this sense events can be seen as actors that have important influences on social systems, particularly in linking localized small world networks with the global space of flows. These ideas are explored through the case of Barcelona, which illustrates the interplay between these different types of events in their total portfolio, and how the extension of ritual in the sense of Collins can also contribute to the generation of new relationships and practices in the contemporary network society. Barcelona is examined as an eventful city in which the alternation of continuity through iterative events and change through pulsar events contributes to increasing the network effects of events.

Blended learning for an educational event in a leisure context: impact on the participants’ experience.

This paper contributes to the blended learning paradigm for educational events in a leisure context, where organisers and participants can no longer rely on a linear approach for knowledge transfer and learning (Robinson, 2011; Giacalone, 2001) in a non-linear world (Castells, 2000). With the design of meaningful experiences at the core of Leisure Studies and of Events as their sub-field (Richards, G., Marques, L. & Mein, K., 2016), it is appropriate to investigate experiential learning and the role of blended learning in the participants’ experience, in a leisure context. The qualitative methodology focuses on in-depth, semi-structured interviews held with students enrolled in leisure studies and tourism management programmes who took part in the World Leisure international field school, which takes place biennially as a satellite event to the World Leisure Congress. The findings indicate that constructing a tailored blended learning experience in an educational event within a leisure context has a positive impact on the participants’ learning experience and knowledge transfer, extending it in terms of time and spaces. This research has relevant implications for practitioners, academics and designers targeting blended learning environments in educational events in leisure-related contexts.

Policies & Strategies: Leisure and Events for preferable futures

Festivals are joining the green movement : sustainability at leisure and events

CDA, Critical Events and Critical Event Studies

This chapter argues that critical discourse analysis (CDA) provides a fruitful methodology for CES. This is due both to its eclectic, abductive research methodology that engages in a dialogue between, theory(ies), methodology(ies), data and the socio-historical context (Reisigl and Wodak 2009). Secondly, CDA, like other critical approaches, adopts a layered approach to research methodology, focusing from the global to meso and micro aspects of an event, or from social structures, to social institutions and social events, always considering the discursive as being both constituted by and constitutive of social structures. It will illustrate this through a brief description of the discourse-historical dimension in CDA which assumes a distinction between content analysis, the analysis of discursive and argumentative strategies and, finally, the analysis of linguistic features (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001). Those basic assumptions will be illustrated through the description of a theoretical-methodological framework recently employed for the study of the Occupy movement in Spain (Montesano Montessori & Morales Lopez, forthcoming). It shows how a framework was assembled that brought social constructivism, narrative analysis, rhetoric and finally the discourse theoretical concept of ‘rearticulation’ together in order to analyse how the Occupy movement helped Spanish citizens to gain agency and voice. In: R Lamond I., Platt L. (eds). Critical Event Studies. Leisure Studies in a Global Era. Palgrave Macmillan, London