Dr Giulia Rossetti

Over the last few decades, storytelling, as a subject for study, has grown exponentially across a number of interdisciplinary fields. However, it remains underdeveloped in event management research, and specifically concerning festival experiences. Following a critical review of the existing research that has contributed to current understanding of storytelling within festival contexts and highlighting the key arguments of these publications, this article provides a comprehensive overview of how storytelling is currently understood within festival contexts. Extending the literature, this article introduces the contributing papers of the Special Issue, which demonstrate the value of storytelling for audiences, hosts and researchers. This article closes with a call for more research into storytelling within festival contexts and encourages future studies to address the identified gaps to help progress understanding of storytelling, its practice and dynamics, and its value for festival experiences.

While experiential learning is well established in Higher Education, several scholars called for more studies on how to embed it for event management students. This paper aims to answer these calls by investigating student and instructor perspectives on delivering a live event for a postgraduate course in an English university. It uses primary as well as secondary data from previous studies to suggest how to plan an experiential learning course. Findings provide practical recommendations to educators in relation to four elements: teaching content; resources and support; assessment; and links to employability. While doing so, Kolb’s cycle is reviewed and a new model of experiential learning for event management students is suggested. Thus, this paper expands the current debate on experiential learning and suggests practical guidelines for event management educators. 

This paper discusses the plan to create an inclusive didactictool: the Irish Colonial Landscape Digital StoryMap that focuses on colonial landscapes in Irish visitor attractions. The inclusive StoryMap will be co-created by three groups of students: Italian secondary school, Irish secondaryschool, and Irish university students. All the students will work together to create the content. The university students will also perform mentoring activities, by observing and providing recommendations on the work of the secondary school students. Thus, the creation of the StoryMap will foster inclusivity between international students, with different age groups. It will be an inclusive educational tool that aims to develop international collaboration, mentoring experience, research skills, and transferable skills. It will alsofoster inclusivity to the students who will use it by fostering a decolonial attitude in dealing with the geographies of colonisation. This paper explains the theoretical underpinnings of this inclusive Irish Colonial Landscape Digital StoryMap and the planning process. Finally, the paper ends by discussing planned outcomes for both the students involved in the creation of the StoryMap as well as the students who will use it.

There is still confusion on what participant observation connotes and scholars call for more studies on researchers’ roles and emotional reflexivity in tourism. This interdisciplinary research aims to unpack participant observations at festivals. Findings from literary festivals in Ireland and Italy suggest that participant observations are Holistic Research Experiences and are characterised by four elements. First, they go beyond the visual and the multisensory nature, to be holistic experiences. Second, fieldwork is emplaced since researchers are situated in the field and can feel bodily sensations and empathy, but are not fully immersed. Third, the researchers’ participation continuum does not go from complete observer to complete participant, but it goes from passive to active involvement in the festival activities. Fourth, different passive/active, intentional/unintentional encounters can take place: human, animal, space, material, and immaterial. Finally, the paper considers future areas for research.

Cultural welfare is an instrument of social cohesion which, using cultural forms, fights inequalities and focuses on health promotion. It is a model for developing individual and community well-being and enhancing bottom-up practices. Festival generate socio-cultural impacts on the territory and on citizens, acting as moments of inclusion and participation, and offering spaces for innovation. Festivals can therefore be tools for creating cultural welfare, triggering processes of social innovation in communities, breaking down some social barriers, improving people's well-being, and enlivening spaces not usually used for cultural activities. This theoretical work does not want to be a systematic review of the existing literature, but a starting point for the analysis of festivals as instruments of cultural welfare.

English is increasingly the dominant language of academic scholarship. This means that much research produced in other languages is overlooked, a tendency strengthened by the growing power of global publishers and university ranking systems. This initial scoping study provides an exploratory review of non-English scholarship in the field of event management, drawing on an extensive literature search in Arabic, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Slovenian and Spanish. We find a considerable number of event management publications in these languages, which effectively represent a ‘missing body of knowledge’ for scholars working in English. Only about 10% of these non-English sources are covered by Scopus, for example. Our scoping study indicates that this excludes many scholars and potentially interesting areas of work from the global event management corpus. We suggest several strategies which could be employed to address these issues.

Festivals have been conceptualised as serious leisure activities as well as arenas for cultural capital acquisition and embodiment. However, there is still theoretical confusion surrounding the process of cultural embodiment, especially in leisure practices. This article suggests that the serious leisure perspective, in combination with cultural capital ideas, offers a means of deepening understanding of how cultural capital can be embodied in festival settings. To make its arguments, the article draws on qualitative data collected at two long-established literary festivals, one in Ireland and one in Italy. Observations and interviews with festival participants were used to develop an understanding of participants’ cultural capital embodiment. The article suggests that the serious leisure perspective is a valuable theory to throw light on three elements of cultural embodiment at festivals: (1) body; (2) pre-existing cultural resources; (3) time. Interlinking serious leisure with cultural capital leads to an in-depth analysis of how culture is embodied during festivals. This article demonstrates the value of using serious leisure and the embodied state of cultural capital ideas in tandem to further understand cultural embodiment in festivals. The study concludes by suggesting potential future studies and areas of research.

The paper explores the role and value of the so-called ‘balcony performances’ – community special events, organized during the first national lockdown in Italy in March-May 2020. Following the constructionist research paradigm, in-depth interviews were collected and analysed to understand how through engaging with special events, residents found ways to deal with uncertainty and distress during the time of lockdown. Balcony events allowed participants to connect with others at a distance, express and share their feelings and emotions and, eventually, transform fear and worry into hope and positivity. The paper reiterates the vital ritualistic role of events in community life and introduces a conceptual framework of the transformative power of events. The framework explains how during times of uncertainty, improvisational creativity within neighbourhoods, expressed in special events, can provide a platform for resilience building and community cohesion. The paper also puts forward a new perspective on residential balconies as event venues.

Purpose - This paper examines the under-investigated well-being outcomes of literary festival attendance. It is an exploratory study into how a festival contributes to attendees’ overall well-being. Drawing from literature on well-being and festival studies, this paper seeks to understand the well-being dimensions generated by festival attendance, and the factors that promote attendees’ health and well-being.

Design/methodology/approach – This exploratory study adopts an inductive and interpretivist approach. Observations, 45 on-site interviews, and 17 follow-up interviews were undertaken at one literary festival in Ireland. Thematic analysis was used to analyse data and identify key themes.  

Findings – The findings reveal that attendees perceived a sense of well-being that included five interconnected dimensions: social, mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical. Results also show that five factors generated attendees’ overall well-being: festival programme, social environment, place, weather conditions, and attendees’ background.

Originality– This paper presents a new comprehensive model that shows that festival attendance has the potential to generate five interconnected dimensions of attendees’ well-being. The model also captures the five main factors that can promote attendees’ health and well-being. The model is proposed to guide further research on attendees’ overall well-being associated with festival attendance. 

This study examines the under-investigated cultural outcomes of small-scale festivals. Specifically, it uses Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital to explore the cultural outcomes of festival participation in rural locations, investigating if and how small-scale festivals are arenas for displaying, reinforcing, and acquiring culture. The aims were to investigate whether attendees enhance their cultural capital by participating in literary festivals and to identify the elements that play a role in this process. Interviews and observations were undertaken at two small-scale literary festivals: Listowel Writers' Week located in a rural village in the west of Ireland, and Pordenonelegge located in a small town in the north of Italy. Findings reveal that cultural capital can be reinforced, stimulated, and acquired in a process that is shaped by both internal and external elements. A new conceptual model capturing this process is presented. The model characterises the internal elements as: demographic features, behavioural dimension, enjoyment, involvement, and pre-existing capitals; and the external elements as: festival features, social context, spatial and temporal dimensions. The empirical findings show how rural literary festivals can be rewarding and fulfilling experiences that lead to individual cultural capital development. Further research is needed to examine whether the model portraying the development of cultural capital associated with literary festival participation can be applied to other types of festivals.