Events
ATLAS Special Interest Group
Events
The coordinator for this Special Interest Group is:
Ilja Simons – Breda University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands
Alba Colombo – Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
The ATLAS Events SIG was founded in 2011, and since then it has organised a wide range of activities related to events research and education. The main objective of the group is to enable members to work together to analyse and understand events and festivals as social, cultural and economic phenomena, and to add to the body of knowledge on events and their effects.
The group aims to:
- Develop and support transnational research on events
- To stage expert meetings and other information exchange activities related to events
- To produce publications of interest to Group members and to the wider academic and practitioner communities
A number of international meetings have been held by the group both at the ATLAS Annual Conference and as stand-alone expert meetings. These meetings have also resulted in a number of publications, including the research monographs Exploring the social impacts of events, Event Design: Social perspectives and practices, and Experiencias turísticas de festivals y eventos. Conference papers have often been included in special issues of journals edited by group members, including issues of Event Management, the International Journal of Event and Festival Management, and the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events. The group has also developed a number of research projects, including the Event Experiences Project, which developed the Event Experience Scale, the Carnival Experiences Project and the Multilingual Event Research Project.
If you want to contact the SIG coordinator, please fill in the form HERE
If you want to join this SIG, please fill in the form HERE
Annual review of activities 2024
The ATLAS Events Group continues to organise meetings in conjunction with the ATLAS Conference and to run research projects.
In 2024 there will be a Special track at the Annual Conference in Breda on the Strategic Role of Events in light of the Sustainable Development Agenda, organised by Marisa de Brito and Ilja Simons from BUAS. This will examine strategic event practices and their impacts on communities, which echoes themes tackled by the group in previous conferences and publications.
The special track organised at the ATLAS Annual Conference in Cork in 2022 has now seen the publication of a special issue on “Sharing and belonging in festival and event space”, edited by Bernadette Quinn and Maarit Kinnunen. This contains papers on the meaning of place-based community events in stigmatised residential areas (McGillivray et al.), a case study of Bon Sons, a community-run festival set in a rural village in central Portugal (De Almeida et al.), an event organised to welcome first-year students at a university in Colombia (Luna-Cortes), a virtual festival staged in response to the Covid pandemic (Pessina), a study of music festival memories (Wood and Kinnunen) and the relationship of the LGBTQ + community to festival spaces (Baxter et al.).
A review of the ATLAS Events Group meeting in Cork by Enya Moore (2023) from the Technological University Dublin was recently published in the Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy. This gave a comprehensive picture of the wide range of subjects covered by the Events Group, and identified a number of key themes, such as solidarity, community, festivals, place-making and digitisation.
More specific themes being covered by current research include the long-running issue of event experiences. This research is now also being applied to the ATLAS Conferences themselves. As part of the World Leisure Organisation project on Physical, virtual and hybrid experiences, the Event Experience Scale (De Geus et al., 2016) was incorporated into the conference assessment for the Annual Conference in Bad Gleichenberg, Austria in 2023. The EES is also being implemented in physical and virtual events in Breda through Angela Dimitrova’s research on the Breda Guardians esports club.
Another aspect of the experience research that has been running for a decade now is the Carnival experiences project, which involves a wide range of international partners. In 2024 data were collected in Brazil, the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy. The initial analysis shows a strong recovery in Carnival experiences in the post-Covid period, with levels of participation and excitement rising in the last two years.
In the Netherlands there was swift return to physical events after the digital pivot of the pandemic. Interestingly, not only physical event attendance grew, but also the level of media consumption related to Carnival. This indicates that Carnival may become more of a mixed-media experience as a result of the pandemic and the growth of virtual experiences.
In the Netherlands there was swift return to physical events after the digital pivot of the pandemic. Interestingly, not only physical event attendance grew, but also the level of media consumption related to Carnival. This indicates that Carnival may become more of a mixed-media experience as a result of the pandemic and the growth of virtual experiences.
The ATLAS Events Group has been running since 2011, and in the intervening years it has generated a large number of publications, including books, articles and special issues of journals. A list of the publications of the group will be available to ATLAS members soon. In the meantime, some of the earlier publications of the group have been made available open access by Tilburg University.
Richards, G., Marques, L. and Mein, K. (2014, eds) Event Design: Social perspectives and practices. Routledge.
Link to full open access text in Tilburg University repository
Richards, G., de Brito, M. and Wilks, L. (2013) Exploring the Social Impacts of Events. Routledge.
Link to full open access text in Tilburg University repository
Richards, G. (2021) Pulling the long tail of event management research. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events.
Link to full open access text in Tilburg University repository
Richards, G. (2019) Event Experience Research Directions. In Armbrecht, J., Lundberg, E. and Andersson, T.D. (eds) A Research Agenda for Event Management. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 79-93.
Link to full open access text in Tilburg University repository
Richards, G. (2019) Measuring the dimensions of event experiences: Applying the Event Experience Scale to cultural events. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events.
Link to full open access text in Tilburg University repository
More information about the activities of the ATLAS Events Group, including meeting reports, research projects and publications can be found on:
https://independent.academia.edu/gregrichards/ATLAS-Events-Group
References
De Geus, S., Richards, G. and Toepoel, V. (2015) Conceptualisation and Operationalisation of Event and Festival Experiences: creation of an Event Experience Scale. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, 16(3), 274-296.
Moore, Enya (2023). Conference Review: Events Special Interest Group track at the ATLAS Annual Conference 2022. Technological University Dublin, Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy, 10(1), 95-101.
Richards, G. & Marques, L. (2024) The Experience of Carnival in 2024: Preliminary Insights from Brazil and the Netherlands. ATLAS Events Group.