Dear MSRians,
I hope that December is treating you well.
I am organising a PDW, which I wish to submit to the MSR division, for the 2026 Academy meeting in Philadelphia.
The core of the PDW is the theme of festivals as spaces that allow, promote and facilitate personal transformation. I am at early stages of forming the proposal and I am open and inviting colleagues with related interests to join me and help shape it.
Background
I like festivals and have been fascinated by their potential as meeting spaces, where minds, bodies and hearts meet and as spaces that can facilitate or initiate personal transformation (which I have observed happening). There are lots of interesting aspects at the individual/psychological, community and organizational levels related to festivals. While festivals were studied by anthropologists, strangely, although they represent a multi-billion-dollar industry in the US alone, with estimates in the range of 100 million to over 200 million attendees per year (just in the US), hardly any organizational or management research has looked into festivals as a main research and scholarly subject. I have never seen a session on festivals in any Academy of Management meetings and, searching the keywords for the last few annual meetings programs, I did not find 'festival' in them.
I have recently started organising more systematically my thoughts from my direct festival experiences and observations and have been working on a paper that discusses festivals as liminal (or liminoid) spaces, which, due to their in-between nature, facilitate deeper personal encounters and may lead to personal transformation. I decided that it is high-time to get festival studies into the Academy. I think that an easy good place to start is with organising a PDW in the MSR division.
I don't have a fixed or finalised format for the PDW but, at this point, I envision a core group of 3-5 colleagues who have interest in exploring how any type of festivals (cultural, religious, musical) can be a fertile ground for meaningful personal experiences. Each of us would present their interests and thoughts and afterwards we'd break into 3-4 thematic discussion groups, finishing the PDW session with a whole-room discussion of emerging topics and how can we take the theme further.
If you have interest in the theme or the PDW, please email me and we'll exchange ideas.
Warm regards,
Jacob
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Dr Jacob Eisenberg, Associate Professor
Email: Jacob.eisenberg@ucd.ie