Many IFEA members and newsletter subscribers are unfamiliar with IFEA Europe's ongoing cooperation with universities. However, we find that members can benefit tremendously from research in the field of festivals, events, and tourism. We encourage you to attend “Journeys of Expression”, the academic research “attachment” to the IFEA Europe conference in Copenhagen, in September, hosted by Leeds Metropolitan University's Department of Tourism and Cultural Change, and held in cooperation with Copenhagen Business School's Center of Tourism and Experience Economy.
The conference features a series of more than 20 recent papers related to the use of festivals and events to stimulate local economic growth: Inspirational research papers include titles such as “Banishing Vikings from the Norseman's Home: Community-Government Conflitch and the Up-Helly-Aa Fire Festival of Shetland, UK”, “Creating Culture in Korea: Tourism, Regeneration, and the Seoul Design Olympiad”, “The Australian Festival of Travel Writing” and “Medieval festivals in Croatia: Manor fair in Dubovac, Karlovac – pitfalls and possibilities in need of re-structuring and re-gaining the image”; just to name a few.
Some practitioners wonder about the value of festival research and focus merely on artistic qualities, immediate audience reactions, and a black bottom line. Others are deeply engaged in providing and analyzing attendance figues, audience preferences, services, and economic impact including fringe benefits to the wider community to continuously improve their festivals. Regardless of ones' standpoint and focus, insight broadens one's perspective. For instance, recent conclusions from the Pozna? round of the festival research workshops were interesting, as they demonstrated the ambivalence of cultural impact. Liverpool 2008, for instance, was deemed a cultural and creative success by the cultural and creative industries, while the ambition of strengthening the civil society through the cultural capital year was deemed as a failure. Who would have guessed?
