Protests as Events

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.

This Protest as Events book comes at a timely juncture in the evolution of the event management field. Until now this field has been dominated by a concern with the operational and logisitical but this book marks a shift in emphasis towards shaping a distinctly critical event studies where the very notion of what an event represents is open to critique. Formal political protests, everyday opposition to issues of social importance and online dissent are all covered in the this text. Furthermore its call to researchers to be explicit about their political and ethical commitments lays the foundation for a radical new way of seeing and understanding events.

• 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 -