This article examines the temporal and spatial boundaries of Edinburgh’s festival identity. It unravels Edinburgh’s festivals in terms of the spaces and identities they produce and their functions. Although there is no one definitive standpoint from which a festival city such as Edinburgh can be objectively mapped, the bounded appeal of live performance, outdoor reveling, and alternative ways of using the city during festival time reveal how the festival gaze manipulates urban identity, public space, and play. By engaging with the spatiality of Edinburgh’s festival culture, the festival identity upon which the city self-consciously relies is explored through the concepts of carnivalesque, play, and the transformation of identity.
This article offers a way of understanding not only Festival Cities, but also the Creative City paradigm and to some extent the practices employed through the convergence of culture and urban planning that has come to dominate the logic of urban space. In its exploration of the 20th century’s nascent administrative imaginary of urban cultural festivals it is in part, a genealogy, but I hope it offers more, that it elaborates a re-reading of the urban predisposition towards a culturalized identity and the curation of affective urban space, which despite the economic downturn, continues to privilege its own legibility. In so doing, this article argues that the city promotes not only its cultural capital, but also its administration.
We explore the case for a Deaf festival in Edinburgh, the self-proclaimed 'world leading Festival City'. The formal recognition of British Sign Language in the BSL (Scotland) Act 2015 is paramount to the cultural and political context. Joining English and Gaelic in Scotland's linguistic landscape, BSL legally summons cultural representation in public life. We approach the study through two distinct methodologies. Firstly, we adopt a discourse analysis of the festival policy that constructs Edinburgh's festival networks and prioritizes distinct mobilities. Secondly, we draw upon a participative debate the authors organised as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2019.The paper contributes to the critical examination of festivals as sites of diversity and inclusivity, both at the point of production and consumption. In doing so, we suggest that greater representation of Deaf and disabled communities in festival networks is a pre-requisite to festivals as inclusive public spaces.
The paper reflects upon the Deaf Heritage Collective, a collaborative project led by Edinburgh Napier University’s Design for Heritage team and Heriot Watt’s Centre for Translation And Interpreting Studies. The project aimed to advance discussion around the British Sign Language Act (Scottish Government 2015) and bring into being a network of Deaf communities and cultural heritage organisations committed to promoting BSL in public life. The aim of this paper is to contextualise the project and its creative approach within the distinctly Scottish context, and the ideals of critical heritage, critical design and the museum activist movement. This paper presents the context and creative processes by which we engaged participants in debate and the struggles we encountered. We describe these processes and the primacy of collaborative making as a mode of inquiry. We argue that by curating a workshop space where different types of knowledge were valorised and where participants were encouraged to “think with” materials (Rockwell and Mactavish 2004) we were able to challenge the balance of power between heritage professionals and members of the Deaf community. By harnessing the explanatory power of collaborative making we debated the assemblages of epistemic inequality, and the imagined futures of Deaf heritage in Scotland.
Increasingly, critical design methods offer heritage scholars new ways of exploring identities, experiences and relationships, extending a dialogic approach that supports the testing and realization of heritage futures (Harrison 2015). This paper focuses upon a two-year national project that aimed to bring together curators, heritage professionals and Deaf communities to consider Deaf heritage as future-making.Throughout four collaborative workshops, participants co-designed model museums, designed BSL infrastructures, formulated Deaf heritage professions and prototyped BSL souvenirs. By materializing heritage processes and 'public things' participants re-purposed their symbolic power to articulate prevailing inequalities and possible Deaf futures. We discuss the ways in which these playful future-making objects revealed hidden, oppressed, and contradictory heritage relations. We argue that a critical design approach to working with BSL users facilitated the disruption of conventional categories of heritage, Deafness and culture.
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