Future trajectories of festival research

Abstract

In their editorial for the first issue of Tourist Studies, Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang made us aware that tourism research had shifted to an exploration of the extraordinary everyday where ‘more or less everyone now lives in a world rendered or reconfigured as interesting, entertaining and attractive – for tourists’. From our standpoint 20 years later, we suggest this particular departure point has important insights to offer our understanding of a quintessential tourism event, that of the festival, which now intervenes in daily life in all manner of ways. In this commentary, we present a reflective commentary on recent scholarship that advocates for more rigour in festival studies, with greater theory development and testing within the festival context, and how this work is suggestive of future directions for festival research. We present several areas that are ripe for further research, particularly given the tumultuous nature of the world we are living in, such as the challenges of climate change and how we might socialise in a post-Covid world. Much has changed in the 20 years since the inception of Tourist Studies, but festivals remain resilient – they will re-emerge in future, perhaps not unscathed but with a renewed sense of purpose.