Event Mobilities

Politics, place and performance

Kevin Hannam, Mary Mostafanezhad, Jillian Rickly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138901865
• eBook ISBN: 9781317450467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Events from a mobilities perspective attend to moments in which individual networks coalesce in place but are not isolated in their performance as they often foster far-reaching and mobile networks of community. In so doing, individuals travel from varying distances to participate in localized performances. However, events themselves are also mobile, and events affect mobility. Mobile events serve as contexts that provide meanings and purpose articulated in relation to, and as, a series of other social actions. They further highlight the role of the body and embodied practices in the performance of events.

Building on Sheller and Urry's (2004) seminal work Tourism Mobilities, the purpose of this book is to further develop event studies research within mobilities studies so as to challenge the limitations that dichotomous understandings of home/away, work/leisure, and host/guest play. Simply put, events are always already place-based and political in the sense that they can both inspire mobility as well as lead to various immobilities for different social groups. The title addresses everyday as well as extraordinary events, shining an empirical and theoretical lens onto the political, economic and social role of events in numerous geographic and cultural contexts. It stretches across academic disciplines and fields of study to illustrate the advantages of a mobilities multi-disciplinary conversation.

This groundbreaking volume is the first to offer a conceptualization and theorization of event mobilities. It will serve as a valuable resource and reference for event, tourism and leisure studies students and scholars interested in exploring the ways the everyday and the extraordinary interlace.

1
Introduction

Towards an agenda for event mobilities research

Kevin Hannam, Mary Mostafanezhad, and Jillian Rickly

The Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, Slavoj Žižek describes an event as ‘an amphibious notion with even more than fifty shades of grey’ (Žižek 2014: 3). He goes on to suggest that ‘An “[E]vent” can refer to a devastating natural disaster or the latest celebrity scandal, the triumph of the people or a brutal political change, an intense experience of a work of art or an intimate decision’ (ibid). Thus, Žižek describes an event as ‘the effect that seems to exceed its causes–and the space of an event is that which opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its causes’ (italics in original, 2014: 5). Chapters in this collection integrate the philosophy of event (Badiou 2007a, 2007b, 2013; Bassett 2008; Colwell 1997; Deleuze 1993; Deleuze and Conley 1992; Zourabichvili 2012) with emerging work in the mobilities paradigm as a way to examine the connections and interconnections between people, place, politics and experience. Scholars working in the mobilities paradigm have examined the relationship between large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world with more localized processes of daily circulation, movement through public space, and the everyday travel of material things (Hannam et al. 2006). On the other hand, philosophers such as Žižek have described an event as something extraordinary that happens beyond sufficient reason and that has the potential to change or shatter our perceptions of reality (2014: 7). Addressing the relationship between the ordinary and the extraordinary event – or how the ordinary becomes extraordinary and vice versa – is a critical goal of this collection. Further, its authors are concerned with the politics of performing events – both the spectacular and the mundane. Understood in this way, events can tell us much about the way they become ordinary or extraordinary as well as how this classification is historically, politically, and culturally produced. Collectively, the chapters in this collection represent an attempt to map out an emerging ‘event mobilities’ framework from which to better understand events, not as mobilities but rather, mobilities as assemblages of events.

This framework builds on recent work in tourism mobilities which scholars often conceptualize in terms of involving the interconnections of various movements: the movement of people, the movement of material things, the movement of more intangible thoughts and fantasies, and the use of old as well as new technologies (Sheller and Urry 2004; Hannam et al. 2014). Importantly, scholars argue that it is not just that tourism is a form of mobility, like other forms of mobility such as commuting or migration, but that different mobilities inform and are informed by tourism (Sheller and Urry 2004). This conceptual framing foreshadows the approach to event studies represented in the chapters in this collection. As events are informed by a range of mobilities, we emphasize how, rather than think in terms of event mobilities, it may be more useful to, conversely, conceptualize mobilities as consisting of networks of events. By focusing on mobilities as networks of events, we open the door for new considerations of the relationships between people, places, and politics at the myriad conjunctures in which they collide.

This collection offers an ‘event mobilities’ framework from which to analyse diverse ‘mega’ as well as ‘minor’ events. For example, rather than focus on spectacular mega-events such as the recent Olympic Games in London (Boyle and Haggerty 2009), mobilities scholars have tended to focus on momentary or temporary events, or a series of memorable events: walking, driving, running, flying, cycling, commuting, busking, sailing, boating, skiing, or hunting (Myers and Hannam 2012). Thus, the act of mobility can become the actual event itself (Cidell 2014). Mobilities are articulated in relation to, and as a series of, other sorts of social functions and pursuits, from travelling to work and numerous leisure activities, to going on holiday, leaving a country in search of work or sanctuary, or to hopping on a bus to get to the supermarket. Mobile events might appear to serve as contexts that provide meanings and purpose to a distinct action – from frantically leaving one’s home to escape a mudslide to embarking on a protest march. Events are also how mobilities become articulated as meaningful activities within different systems and categories of knowledge. Indeed, place identities, as well as personal identities, are frequently communicated in terms of narratives of events – moments in time-space through which they become linked.

On the one hand, when we consider mobilities as events we also enable mobility to be understood as much more than an undifferentiated flow and instead as a series of identifiable activities. Weddings, for example, routinely involve complex orderings of mobility and proximity in the social, familial and religious obligations to travel to the event (Urry 2002; Sattar et al. 2013). Weddings are also ritualistic and representative of personal identity transformations from (at least) ‘unmarried’ to ‘married’. But frequently such events also involve multiple governance assemblages – for example when a non-EU or non-US citizen seeks to marry an EU or US citizen. This can lead to the reconfiguring of a wedding as a series of multiple events, of multiple weddings in different geographical locations to gain the necessary paperwork rather than an event as a single point in time. Events of love, for example, are institutionalized by the state (Mai and King 2009). Analysing the mobilities of events allows us to make sense of the human and technological systems that societies produce and reproduce. What follows is a review and development of mobilities approaches to researching events. We begin by outlining some of the key concepts in mobilities. We then develop these concepts in terms of event mobilities. Finally, we consider how event mobilities can be conceptualized as interruptions, transitions, framings, and materialities.

Mobilities

Mobilities scholars examine movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world in ways that emphasize the complexities of mobility and the corollary reconfiguration of geopolitical discourses (Hannam et al. 2006; Hannam 2013). International relations can have profound effects on when, who, and for what reason people are able to freely move across international borders. Geopolitical discourses or ‘scripts’, as shown in any variety of institutional and popular media, work to divide up the world in ways that can lead to conflicts over space and resources (O’Tuathail 2002). Global media representations contribute to the ongoing ordering of social life and the ways in which people and things move across space and borders. However, mobilities scholars seek to understand how such ordering is also networked with everyday mobilities, developing the notion of performativities and the ‘more than representational’. Thus, conceptualizing mobilities is not just about recognizing the interconnections between different forms of mobility such as travel and migration, but developing a more nuanced epistemology of the movements of people, places, and things. Scholars have sought to develop the notion of ‘performativity’ in relation to mobilities (Nash, 2000; Hannam 2006).

Performativity scholars seek out ‘a more embodied way of rethinking the relationships between determining social structures and personal agency’ (Nash, 2000: 654). In non-representational theory, meanwhile, scholars examine physical or emotional behaviours that are not necessarily understood through conventional models of human behaviour. Non-representational theories challenge the status of social constructionist understandings of the world by highlighting some of the limitations of representational approaches and suggesting insights from actor-network theory concerning the complex relationships between humans and the material worlds they encounter – often through specific events.

Nigel Thrift (1997: 126–127) explains how non-representational theory is about ‘practices, mundane everyday practices, that shape the conduct of human beings toward others and themselves at particular sites.’ It is not ‘concerned with representation and meaning, but with the performative “presentations”, “showings”, and “manifestations” of everyday life’. Non-representational theorists examine the ways in which ordinary people appreciate ‘the skills and knowledges they get from being embodied beings’. Drawing upon Thrift’s work, Nash, meanwhile, argues that the notion of performativity:

is concerned with practices through which we become ‘subjects’ decentred, affective, but embodied, relational, expressive and involved with others and objects in a world continually in process. … The emphasis is on practices that cannot adequately be spoken of, that words cannot capture, that texts cannot convey – on forms of experience and movement that are not only or never cognitive.

(2000: 655)

Thus, the emphasis on pre-linguistic experience is relevant to the analysis of the bodily experience of events.

A crucial complement to understanding the world as ‘more than representational’ is, therefore, attending to the agency of other people, non-human beings, materialities, and mobilities. With the performative turn, attention to embodiment as well as agency expands enquiries to include relations of power between the actors involved. In the case of a mobilities perspective on events, one need not look further than the use of information technologies (mapping applications, social media, mobile banking, among many others) as changing the conditions of tourism and events mobilities, as well as the way we think about events (see Cresswell and Martin 2012).

The notion of performativity is thus concerned with the ways in which people know the world without knowing it, the multi-sensual practices and experiences of everyday life as such proposes a post-humanistic approach to the understanding of social life. As Peter Adey (2009: 149) notes: ‘[t]his is an approach which is not limited to representational thinking and feeling, but a different sort of thinking-feeling altogether. It is a recognition that everyday mobilities such as walking or dancing involve various combinations of thought, action, feeling and articulation.’ Recently, ‘more than representational theory’ has been put forward, as a way of analysing the coupling of representations to the non-representational embodied practices discussed above (Adey 2010). Mobilities research thus examines the embodied nature and experience of different modes of travel, seeing these modes in part as forms of material and sociable dwelling-in-motion, places of and for various activities. These ‘activities’ can include specific forms of talk, work, or information-gathering, but may involve simply being connected, maintaining a moving presence with others that holds the potential for many different convergences or divergences of global and local physical presence (Hannam et al. 2006).

Conceptualizing mobilities also entails attention to how distinct social spaces or ‘moorings’ orchestrate new forms of social and cultural life (Hannam et al. 2006). Examples include stations, hotels, motorways, resorts, airports, leisure complexes, beaches, galleries, roadside parks, and so on. Understanding mobilities in this context requires a place-based perspective. Places are thus not so much fixed but are implicated within complex networks through which ‘hosts, guests, buildings, objects and machines’ are contingently brought together to produce certain performances (Hannam et al. 2006: 13). Moreover, places are also ‘about proximities, about the bodily co-presence of people who happen to be in that place at that time, doing activities together, moments of physical proximity between people that make travel desirable or even obligatory for some’ (Hannam et al. 2006: 13). In their discussion of Singapore as the archetypal ‘mobile city’, for example, Oswin and Yeoh argue that the:

mobile city approach understands the city as much more than a calculation of border-crossing labour and capital inputs and outputs. A process-orientation enables examination of interrelationships of movements of people, objects, capital and ideas in and through the overlapping scales of the local, the bodily, the national, and the global.

(2010: 170)

Although mobilities researchers often emphasize multi-scalar relationality (Oswin and Yeoh 2010), in what follows we outline an agenda for place-based research into event mobilities. We also consider how events and the mobilities that make up events also make places through the performativities discussed above.

Conceptualizing event mobilities

Adey et al. (2013) ask: ‘How do different events of moving, slowing, staying, passing, pausing, or rushing inform the meaning and experience of mobility?’ This question is in part engaged with by Žižek’s (2014) who reflects on the philosophical consequences of events. Significantly, Žižek (2014) begins by asking us to take a risk by attempting to define an ‘event’. Thus, as we have boarded this train, we are already on the move. As noted above, an event is commonly understood as, at least, something out of place, something shocking that interrupts the normal flow of things that comes out of the blue such as the events of the ‘Arab Spring’ – a synergy that nobody can actually explain fully. Events then are somewhat enigmatic and imaginative in that, as Žižek contends, they seem to exceed their causes and (2014: 3). Events can be considered as traumatic, life-changing experiences such as the ‘intrusion of something new which remains unacceptable for the predominant view’ (Žižek 2014: 77). Events, from this perspective are always political, charged with notions of ‘freedom’ and significantly often involve a degree of excess, violent or otherwise, in the social encounters formed by such events (Badiou 2007a, 2007c, 2013; Heidegger 2012; Zourabichvili 2012).

An event can also be conceived as a change: a change in terms of the ways in which reality may appear to us as well as a transformation of the self. An event thus produces something new and heralds a symbolic transition as social anthropologists have recognized in terms of progression through the human life course in diverse societies (Turner 1969). Žižek (2014) considers the motion of events as ‘a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it’ (Žižek 2014: 10). This alludes to the ways in which films and other media commonly saturate our understandings of events and the places of events as has been demonstrated in analyses of films such as Slumdog Millionaire in Mumbai where tourists seek to re-perform significant events from the film while on tour (Diekmann and Hannam 2012) or where Chinese tourists in northern Thailand re-enact scenes from the Chinese blockbuster hit, Lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: towards an agenda for event mobilities research
• 2 All the way to Timbuktu: mobilizing imaginaries in the globalized space of the Festival in the Desert, Mali
• 3 Waltzing around the world: musical mobilities and the aesthetics of adaptation
• 4 Framing identities and mobilities in heavy metal music festival events
• 5 Game of Thrones to game of sites/sights: framing events through cinematic transformations in Northern Ireland
• 6 Making home ‘Under the Big Top’: materialities of moving a small town every day and wintering in place
• 7 Time and space to run: the mobilities and immobilities of road races
• 8 Necromobility/choreomobility: dance, death and displacement in the Thai–Burma border-zone
• 9 Mobility slogans: rhetoric, movement, and #WeAreHere
• 10 Food sovereignty galas: transnational activism for rich moral economies and poor livelihoods
• 11 Food as a quixotic event: producing Lebanese cuisine in London
• 12 Afterword
• Index