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Tullia Jack

Tullia Jack

Associate senior lecturer

Tullia Jack

Should there be more showers at the summer music festival? : Studying the contextual dependence of resource consuming conventions and lessons for sustainable tourism

Author

  • Tullia Jack
  • Russell Hitchings
  • Alison Browne

Summary, in English

Summer music festivals that involve a few days of camping have often been linked to sustainability agendas. Yet relevant studies have so far overlooked how these events can themselves serve as experiments in less resource consumptive living. Building on a wider interest in the cultural evolution of cleanliness norms, this paper explores how attendees come to use water in personal washing at two UK festivals. Through survey, observation and interview research, it examines how current festival goers respond to the disruption of their usual washing regimes, paying particular attention to how a combination of social and infrastructural cues serves to encourage the emergence of a temporary new cleanliness culture. Doing so highlights the value of seeing human resource consumption as a matter of dynamic collective convention more than fixed personal preference since these respondents were seen to embrace a new relationship with washing that was otherwise deemed unthinkable. This leads to a broader discussion of how visitor needs and the social world are most usefully studied by both future festival organisers and the wider field of sustainable tourism research.

Department/s

  • Sociology

Publishing year

2018-03-04

Language

English

Pages

496-514

Publication/Series

Journal of Sustainable Tourism

Volume

26

Issue

3

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Routledge

Topic

  • Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
  • Social Sciences Interdisciplinary

Keywords

  • Festivals, cleanliness, water consumption, social norms

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0966-9582