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Searching for Sites of Liminality in Giga-Events

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Abstract

Giga-events disrupt urban communities and businesses rendering vulnerable social groups marginalised, unable to leverage economic benefits. We focus on event visitor economies during the ‘live staging’ between the Olympic Games Opening and Closing Ceremony. Giga-events are managed to redirect visitor economic consumption from small business communities towards official sites of corporate consumption. Using this critique of large-scale events, the burgeoning accounts of liminality are used to disrupt and provide a potential antidote to the neoliberal practices of giga-events. Proposing where liminality may be fostered demonstrates the conceptual and practical ways host communities, policymakers, event managers can develop emancipatory spaces ‘betwixt and in-between’. Divergent forms of liminal space have been overlaid across ‘Live Sites’ to illustrate how vulnerable social groups can leverage visitor economy opportunities.

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Acknowledgement

This work was supported by 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions [Research and Innovation grant agreement no. 823815].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Seth I. Kirby

  2. Coventry University, Coventry, UK

    Michael B. Duignan

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  1. Seth I. Kirby
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Correspondence to Seth I. Kirby .

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  1. School of Events, Tourism and Hospitality Management, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK

    Ian R. Lamond

  2. School of Events, Tourism and Hospitality Management, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK

    Jonathan Moss

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Kirby, S.I., Duignan, M.B. (2020). Searching for Sites of Liminality in Giga-Events. In: Lamond, I., Moss, J. (eds) Liminality and Critical Event Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40256-3_6

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