Protests as Events

Can activism be considered a leisure activity? Can the Occupy movement, local campaigns for change and lone acts of personal resistance be understood as events?
Within the field of Events Management the content of events is generally analyzed within three categories-culture, sport or business. Such a typology can be helpful as a heuristic for interpretation and analysis within a commercial paradigm. However, this framework overlooks and depoliticizes a significant variety of events, those more accurately construed as protest.
Protests as Events is the first book to explore activism as a leisure activity and protests as events; using a fresh interpretation of event to develop a new critical politics of events and leisure. Bringing together a range of cutting edge research from around the world, it explores a variety of protests through the lens of events studies and leisure in order to understand how the study of events management might be conceptualized in the protest space.

Ian Lamond is lecturer of events management at Leeds Metropolitan University. His research is concerned with the working practices of social movements and how such movements respond to policy change. His work has been presented at several international conferences-spanning disciplines such as political science; political communication, policy studies, critical tourism studies and critical discourse analysis.
Karl Spracklen is Professor of leisure studies at Leeds Metropolitan University. He teaches leisure theory, popular culture; philosophy and sociology of sports science, as well as research methods and dissertation support, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, across the School. He has published widely in the area of leisure studies with works including "Leisure, Sport and Society" (2013), "Whiteness and Leisure" (2013), "Constructing Leisure, Historical and Philosophical Debates" (2011) and "Habermas and the Meaning of Leisure" (2009) all with Palgrave Macmillan.

Introduction- Ian Lamond and Karl Spracklen/ Part I Mediatisation and Media Spectacle/ 1 The construction of contested public spheres: Discourses of protest and identity in a British campaigning organisation- Ian Lamond, Cassandra Kilbride and Karl Spracklen/ 2 SlutWalk Hong Kong and the media - Angie Ng/ 3 Lights, camera, direct action: The protest spectacle as media opportunity and message sender - Jonathan Cable/ 4 Paving the way for anti-militarism in Romania: activists, events and public authorities during the 2008 NATO summit - Henry Rammelt/ Part II Identity, Embodiment and Categorization/ 5 Academic-activism(s) in urban resistances: Pioneers or obstacles for a common ground - Nezihe Basak Ergin/ 6 As Barriers Fall, contingency becomes possibility: Protest resisting and escaping containment and categorization - Christian Garland/ 7 'It's a Beautiful Thing, the Destruction of Wor(l)ds' - Aylwyn Walsh and Myrto Tsilimpounidi/ 8 The logic of movement practice: An embodiment approach to activist research -