Belated Blog

I started this blog about 4 months ago and still haven't posted... I've been thinking about it, really I have. And now, the hour is upon us and the dissertation topic presentation is tomorrow and I can't stop changing my mind on what I'm doing! Thus, I thought it was a good opportunity to write some areas of interest down to try and piece something vaguely coherent together out of the the jumble in my head. 

My broad area of interest began with social regeneration through events. I wanted to look at the impact major events/festivals (arts and cultural) have on the local community - do they identify with the event? has it effected social change in any way? I was interested if perhaps, through events led development of social and cultural capital in a community could areas such as education and crime rates be influenced. However, I never really decided on what community and event I wanted to focus on.

I then found out about a music festival in Serbia called Exit that occurs in July and will be in its tenth year this year. The festival began as a protest again the regime of Slobodan Milosevich and ran for 100 days, climaxing with a 'Get Out and Vote Party' just prior to the elections that ended Milosevich's reign. The festival has evolved massively since then and its present incarnation it is a 4 day music festival with approximately 30% of attendees being international. (More info at http://eng.exitfest.org). Despite the fact that Milosevich's reign has long been over, the festival has continued to have a strong political agenda aimed at governmental and social change raising issues such as visa abolishment, trafficking, exploitation, and environmental awareness. I had a strong interest in political theatre during my first degree and I'd really like to explore the capacity of events such as Exit as political forums perpetuating change, and equally, their capacity to promote propaganda. There are some criticisms that the commercialisation of the event in recent years has led to a compromise of the original agenda. This led me to start thinking about authenticity and sponsorship and I once again got distracted from the topic. 

I'm concerned that tackling a festival in Europe will be making things harder than they need to be perhaps and I have still not defined what exactly it is I want to investigate... which is a slight problem. That's it for now, I don't think I'm any further ahead after writing it down but maybe someone out there can offer some direction while I go back to the books in search of inspiration.