Although it presents itself as a single phenomenon, the festival is actually a kind of meta- text, or an assemblage of texts and discourses, a composite of different realities, symbolic and contingent, or a situated set of events and understandings which are comprehensible only in context. The spatial and temporal aspects of a festival’s form and mode of
participation creates a series of thresholds to be crossed, the entering of a bounded space generates experiential, sensory elements to the experience that are perhaps hard to capture, but nonetheless important to try and describe. Given the extremely networked nature and the modes of working that characterise cultural sectors, it was not expected that the study sites would have neat boundaries and the inductive approach taken to the research inevitably made it an iterative and selective process. Phases of observation involved back and forth movements, going out to events then ‘coming back’ and reflecting on what had been discovered, adjusting the study, going out again with slightly different set of questions. The data in this study was collected through these observations, experiences and interactions with space and place, while interviews explored the relationship between production and infrastructure and its shifts over time.
The first part of this chapter will explain the theoretical rationale for a qualitative study of festivals and discuss the ‘researcher as instrument’ in ethnographic fieldwork, giving consideration to the importance of reflexivity in social research. The second part goes on to outline the actual approach taken and the strategy used in detail and in a progression of stages. From mapping and categorising to developing the criteria used and choosing where to start to fieldwork, selecting respondents and conducting interviews, the choices made are explained and justified.
The body of the research is grounded in empirical inquiry, but it engages with and is informed by theory as part of its inductive and iterative process. The chapter ends with a brief description of each of the three festivals selected for further research.
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Why qualitative research?
This study began with questions about the meaning of cultural practices within an institutional framework, but without a sole hypothesis to test. The production of culture perspective, discussed in the previous chapter, is an orientation rather than a specific methodology, so developing a methodology for this study was a matter of informed judgement.
Taking into account what Getz (2010) and others have already said about taking a more interpretative approach to festivals, this research aimed to theoretically and critically appraise the festivals it studied, rather than conduct surveys of them or measure their impacts. Festivals have frequently been studied for their outcomes, but this project has concentrated on the meanings of their deliberately assembled texts, forms and content and how the presentation of these is regulated or constrained (to an extent) by the conventions of event management, aesthetic practice and institutional objectives. To preserve the dynamic pluralism found in the literature on festivals (summarised in Chapter three) the phenomenon of university festivals was approached using qualitative methods brought together under the umbrella terms of interpretative and ‘imaginative’ research (Jacobsen et al 2013). Because this study is also interested in questions of political transformation and its effects, it aimed for a critical outlook (Carroll 2004). This meant questioning ways of doing things and taking a position on the epistemological and ontological basis of social inquiry. As a study of festivals is a form of social and cultural research it is important to situate the research within a broader set of questions about how to apply the tools of research to a research problem.
The tools used are determined by the methodological framework, which reflects the underlying approach; “a methodological framework rooted in positivist assumption will employ different methods from one embedded in a constructivist framework, with the former more likely to rely on standardised metrics and quantifiable units of analysis and the latter on qualitative and narrative approaches to meet its primary concern with meaning-making” (Crossick and Kaszynska 2016 p.120).
95 The sociology of culture is full of paradigms and positions, agendas, techniques and
modes of analysis which are claimed by knowledge domains, or disciplines in different ways (Hall 1999). Social research employs a diverse range of methods including, but not limited to, experiments, surveys, interviews, observation, biographies, diaries, archives and datasets. For studies of social or cultural phenomena to be critical, Alford (1998) suggests they must move up the causal chain from observation, interpretation and categorization to a reflection on the conditions of production. He suggests that when the researcher is interested in institutional rationalities that may cause, inhibit or inflect culture’s effects, the interpretative paradigm is used in conjunction with the historical. Qualitative sociology offers the means to produce an appropriate methodology to study culture’s socio-cultural or political dimensions because it considers the relationship between social structures, social events and human agency in an interpretative paradigm, it is interested in meanings, theories and concepts. Qualitative methods do not belong to a single discipline, they are associated with an interpretive view of the social world and are centred on individual experiences and meaning-making (Denzin and Lincoln 2003). Other studies of festivals have been sources of inspiration, as shown in the last chapter, but looking at their methodology also meant thinking hard about the kinds of data those approaches would produce.
The inductive methodological approach taken comes from the tradition of cultural sociology or cultural studies, where methods such as textual analysis, participant
observation and interviews construct an interpretative dialogue around the subject. This study has involved fieldwork. Unlike quantitative research, where the research processes tends to be planned at the start, immersion in the field is often the first phase of an inquiry.
Ethnography is an interdisciplinary research approach, originating in anthropology, thought to be suitable for the examination of the social world of event participants and the meanings people bring to events (Holloway, Brown and Shipway 2010). It is a methodology for studying “the immediate sociocultural contexts in which human
existence unfolds” (Jorgensen 1989 p.12) which makes it good for exploratory studies such as this and exceptionally suitable for studying the appearance of something new.
96 cultural setting and cannot be generalised, but also its irreproducibility and potential bias. Decisions have to be made on the level of involvement or participation and how
recordings will be made. “By attending the event even as a passive spectator, the
researcher becomes a participant in the event, taking part in the social setting” (Mackellar 2013 p.58).
The study has also been interested in texts, which includes the social texts produced by interactions between people. As Fairclough (2012) pointed out, social events have semiotic dimensions. His approach to textual analysis is based in critical realism and asserts that as constituent parts of the social world, social events, objects and institutions are parts of social reality (Fairclough 2012). Social objects have “causal powers”
(Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer 2004 p.25) and these are used selectively in discourse by human actors. Discourses can become enacted in the inculcation of new identities or new subjects to the extent that people start to see themselves in their terms. A critical
awareness of these discursive language practices keeps the researcher alert to ways in which human subjects are being constructed within hegemonic systems of power: “We may say that social agents produce events in occasioned and situated ways” (Fairclough 2012 p.457). It is a realist perspective, but the methodology can be used “in dialogue with other disciplines and theories which are addressing contemporary processes of social change” (Fairclough 2012 p.452). The use of this mode of thought helps to preserve the political critique of those responsible for the reproduction in discourse of dominance and inequality (van Dijk 1993) and so it is productive for this thesis to apply his ideas on the role of instrumental discourses to the social transformation of HE.
Other approaches to studying social organisation have preferred to view humans as active agents in making meanings, rather than assume they are passive recipients of social forces. In Becker’s influential sociology of art worlds (1974) he asks the important question “who is joining together to produce what events?” (Becker 1974 p.774). His theory of cultural participation is as a mode of collective action. He takes the view that people organising themselves socially involves networks of cooperative activity that are mediated by conventions. When studying the motivations and attitudes of individual cultural workers, qualitative evidence can be seen as the only way to 'get at' the reality of cultural work and the emergent subjectivities in these fields (Oakley 2009 p.22). In the
97 context of university engagement, Perry (2011) believes that individuals and individual institutions are overlooked in the wider analysis and the interviews with individual members of festival production at different levels aimed to address this issue. The combination of methods produces an intersubjective and multi-disciplinary discursive formation around the phenomenon of university festivals, in which social events are produced by networks made up of active and self-reflexive human agents and imaginaries materialised as modes of discourse. “Combining ethnographic observations of numerous incidents with subsequent informal conversations with those present is a powerful data collection strategy” (Charmaz 2014 p.23). The approach here distinguishes between an ‘external’ structural and material world and the lived ‘inner’ subjective experiences of the individual.
Within this multidimensional matrix of concepts, meanings and ideas is the researcher, part of the phenomenon they are researching, a human participant in the observing and sense-making practices, organising the workflow and making choices. This is an approach that calls for a high level of personal reflexivity.
Reflexive researcher: an objective / subjective dilemma.
In social research, especially in ethnographic and participation-based studies, where the researcher is also the research tool, the way social structures are comprehended is bound to be affected by the researcher’s own social position and experience. Even the choice of topic and strategy reflects the researcher’s curiosity and standpoint (Wodak 1999). Taking a perspective positions the observer, whose point of view depends on their own practice and position in the field, whereas an objective account has the effect of insulating or obscuring the narrator. To try and manage the interpellation between social research and social life, May suggests researchers must examine their own positions and the conditions that regulate them using a mediation between “gaze and position” (May 2007 p.121). Giving an account of ourselves in relation to the object of knowledge in this way encourages self-reflexivity. Having made these points, here is where parts of the thesis start to become narrated in the ‘first-person’ voice. I feel I should account for myself, which means including in this chapter on the methodology some of the extra-academic
98 experiences that have informed the direction of the study and the interpretation of the findings through a series of questions and reflexive problematisation, to consciously and deliberately include my personal experiences and account for my affective presence within the research, as an active part of the culture I have studied. My account is not impartial neither does it aim for any sense of detachment from the chosen topic, rather I have drawn on my experience and subjectivity as a self-reflexively positioned participant within the field, not only as scholar studying universities, but as festival organiser going to festivals, a curator of content and creator of festival events. In the 25 years prior to
starting this PhD, I have attended countless festivals as a spectator, I have worked at some of them in various roles and organised events at several more. As a contributing member of film festival organising teams in Bradford and Leeds, I had become interested in activities that connected festivals and universities and observed how my colleagues worked with researchers, senior lecturers and PhD students to devise, source and present thematic programmes and how academics provided contextualising introductions at events and participated in post-screening Q&A sessions. During the early part of the PhD I participated in the Being Human festival run by University of London and AHRC. These experiences inspired the selection of this topic but it makes me part of the culture I am studying and I have just declared an involvement in the field.
How has my background experience counted? With an academic background in cultural studies and cultural policy studies, I am interested in questions of access to and the circulation of cultural texts, objects and discourses. I am particularly interested in those cultural experiences not determined by the market, or that are ‘beyond the mainstream’ and how this produces effects within the cultural economy. Because of these experiences and orientations, I felt that it was important that I had no pre-existing connections with the festivals I was studying and that their events were being held in unfamiliar places. This approach was also useful for disrupting tacit knowledge of festival environments where I have worked. Despite having a good level of access to some potential research sites through contacts and networks, it was felt that prior knowledge of places and emotional connections with them could have affected my judgement.
99 This choice to start with festivals that were previously unknown to me was also influenced by Benjamin’s ‘at first glance’ methodology. Many of the festival events observed took place in unusual locations and the fieldnotes account for the experience of a researcher locating, travelling to or entering unfamiliar settings and where possible, notes were made about the subjective feelings produced by attending them.
Deciding on a fieldwork-based research strategy also raised issues of travel and finances, which had impacts on the choices of event and festival attendance. It would have been more difficult, for example, to have studied a festival in another country. Before
embarking on the PhD I didn’t own an internet enabled mobile device, having previously been on low wage, insecure employment contracts. Yet it soon became clear that I couldn’t fully participate in the events I was attending by not having internet access and I repeatedly got lost navigating my way on public transport to new places.
Has my practice changed over this period? While I have remained grounded in my local networks of production, I have extended them through this research to include some of the people I have encountered through the research interests and the experience of these festivals has prepared me for deeper participation in discussions and made me think more critically at all times when I engage with film. I hope then, that this thesis works as a provocation for cultural producers who would like to work with universities or academics to encourage them find the opportunities and circumstances to do so and to understand the contexts and conditions that they will have to negotiate in the process.
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Research strategy
The intention to produce a discursive formation around the phenomenon of university festivals had practical implications, such as the selection of individual festivals to focus on and when to begin. Initial research into the university festival phenomenon in 2013 quickly revealed over 70 festivals were, a number that has been upwardly revised
throughout the research period as new discoveries were made. The majority of this work was desk based, although the direction the research took was influenced by a few scoping visits to UK cities and universities.
Festival programmes can often be downloaded as PDF files and they can contain huge amounts of statements, pictures, information about partners and sponsors, director’s ‘welcomes’ and the written copy about individual events. A qualitative analysis of the available documents produced by festivals gave an overview of the programmes of events, locations and collaborating partners. The field was mapped systematically by conducting a series of online searches using the name of a UK HEI8 and the word festival together and locating these sorts of documents. One drawback with this method was that it was not always easy to tell if the festival had been one-off event or one that took place on an or annual basis, another was that it was laborious and the results rather hit or miss. For example, searching for Edge Hill University using Google revealed links between the university and the Liverpool International Music Festival, the Liverpool International Gothic Festival in 2013 and a festival called Creative Animation Knowledge Exchange, but didn’t reveal a known link to the international touring programme of the Annual Ann Arbor Film Festival until page three of the search results. The method had other drawbacks; some university-festival partnerships had a web presence more effectively optimised for search engines, these included the UCL’s Festival of the Arts, the University of Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas, the University of Warwick’s annual Book Festival, the Bangor Science Festival, Liverpool Hope University’s Cornerstone Arts Festival and University of Leicester’s Festival of Postgraduate Research. Internet analytics also meant that the results of searches were weighted towards the North West of England, due to the IP address used.
101 City visits produced different insights. The desk based research had found that University of Sheffield presents an interdisciplinary festival called The Festival of the Mind every two years. During a visit to Sheffield in 2013, I noticed logos for Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Sheffield’s student union printed on front cover of the brochure for ‘Off The Shelf’, Sheffield’s ‘festival of words’, indicating a high level of interaction between both HEIs and festival. Both institutions also appeared as ‘major sponsors’ of Doc / Fest documentary film festival in the same year.
A printed guide to the Autumn Season of the Bristol Festival of Ideas, picked up while attending Encounters Film Festival in September 2013, had “In association with University of Bristol” printed on the front cover, it also listed the University of the West of England as a festival supporter inside the back cover. University of Bristol was discovered to be a founding member of the first Festival of Ideas in 2004 with Bristol Cultural Development Partnership, part of Bristol’s bid to be Capital of Culture in 20089. The programme for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2014, picked up on a family visit, is organised by the two