Introducing Power, Meaning and Authenticity

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Allan Jepson, and Alan Clarke, eds., Power, Construction, and Meaning in Festivals, on November 2017, available online at: https://www.routledge.com/Power-Construction-and-Meaning-in-Festivals/Jepson-Clarke/p/book/9781138063228. Under embargo until 10 May 2019.Our book contains contributions from 20 researchers, all of which are intrigued by the prospect of what events can achieve positively for their stakeholders’, and the ways in which power, meaning and authenticity are central concepts to achieving potential positive outcomes in the creation of events.Final Accepted Versio

Understanding the value of events for families, and the impact upon their quality of life

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in The Value of Events, on 9 May 2017. Under embargo until 9 November 2018. The published version is available online at: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781317193241.Drawing on previous conceptual and empirical research (Jepson & Stadler, in press) this chapter explores the contemporary issue of Quality of Life (QOL) and opens critical discourse to ascertain how festival and event attendance could potentially improve QOL for families, individuals and communities. The research presented here clearly has overlap with many other areas of investigation such as; leisure provision, constraints and participation levels (see Hinch et al 2005), or designing events to enhance social interaction (see Nordvall et al, 2014). Our focus here though is upon family orientated festivals and events. Our discussions of value are set in the context of what events mean to families and the potential family socialisation value they could gain from attending them which in turn has the potential to enhance a family’s overall QOL.Final Accepted Versio

Conceptualising the Impact of Festival and Event Attendance upon Family Quality of Life (QOL)

Allan Jepson and Raphaela Stadler, 'Conceptualizing the impact of festival and event attendance upon family quality of life (QOL)', Event Management, Vol. 21 (1): 47-60, published 15 February 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3727/152599517X14809630271078. Copyright © 2017 Cognizant, LLC.Quality of Life (QOL) research has been quite well explored in medicine, psychology and the social sciences although it has received very little attention within festival and event studies. This proposition paper is both conceptual and exploratory and will seek to establish the foundations of a framework to investigate the impact(s) festivals and events may have upon individual and family QOL and to set a research agenda for research into QOL in the field of festival and event studies. The paper begins with a review of literature which sets the conceptual nature of the article in the area of festival studies and in doing so investigates interconnected themes such as; political, social, cultural, and personal impact discourses. Following this our paper provides a review of literature introducing key QOL theories, concepts and research undertaken in previous studies. The paper then progresses naturally into a discussion of the key differences and relationships between individual and family QOL; and provides an overview of previous research in festivals and events to allow the study to develop research questions in order to situate this paper and our future research agenda. Following the literature review we present a discussion of key methodological considerations in order to determine the most appropriate and practical framework for collecting and analysing primary data to better understand the potential impacts of festivals and events on families QOL. The final section of the paper concludes and reflects upon our review of literature and research questions which we hope will set an agenda for future research in this area and on the development of a framework to test QOL within events.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Perceptual Grouping for Contour Extraction

This paper describes an algorithm that efficiently groups line segments into perceptually salient contours in complex images. A measure of affinity between pairs of lines is used to guide group formation and limit the branching factor of the contour search procedure. The extracted contours are ranked, and presented as a contour hierarchy. Our algorithm is able to extract salient contours in the presence of texture, clutter, and repetitive or ambiguous image structure. We show experimental results on a complex line-set. 1

Tourism and Neurodiversity: A Problematisation and Research Agenda

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)This paper focuses on the concept of neurodiversity and how it applies to tourism. Through a critical analysis based on the social model of disability, the paper begins by highlighting that neurodiversity has been poorly problematised in tourism research. Using the challenges involved in holidaymaking for families with autistic children as an example, the paper demonstrates how tourism providers and governments have failed to identify what changes are required to meet the needs of neurodivergent people and who should be responsible for implementing them. From this discussion, a framework for action with three tiers of responsibility (governments, the tourism system, neurodiverse families) is developed. The paper then concludes with a research agenda for the future study of tourism and neurodiversity with particular reference to the social model of neurodiversity and the responsibilities of the tourism industry, tourists and governments (including charitable organisations). From this a call to arms for all tourism researchers to embrace research into neurodiversity through the framework and research agenda is developed.Peer reviewe

Sustainable Humans: A framework for applying Sustainable HRM principles to the Events Industry

© 2022 Cognizant, LLC. This is the final published pdf which has been published by Cognizant Communication Corporation in Event Management, Volume 26, Number 8, 2022, pp. 1817-1832, and the Version of Record can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.3727/152599522X16419948694757. The article(s) and/or figure(s) cannot be used for resale.Most research into human resource management offers best practice strategies but often assumes that employees and organisations are homogenous. The events industry is fundamentally different: it is a stressful, fast-paced, competitive, deadline-driven industry with unsociable working hours. HRM in events currently adopts a short-term and operational approach, which has led to the industry having high staff turnover, and employees suffering from high levels of stress, poor mental health and professional burnout. Using an online survey and in depth semi-structured interviews with event industry employees, this paper critically examines sustainable HRM principles with the aim of understanding if, and how, they could be implemented in the events industry as an alternative to reduce employee stress and to achieve longer term wellbeing – a state which is beneficial not just to the individual, but to organisations and the industry as a whole. A framework for future research is presented and practical implications discussed.Peer reviewe

“Work it, work it, non-stop" – event industry employees’ unconscious application of the Five Ways to Wellbeing

© 2022 Raphaela Stadler, Trudie Walters and Allan Stewart Jepson. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Purpose – This paper explores mental wellbeing in the events industry. We argue that mental wellbeing is often difficult to achieve in the stressful and deadline-driven events industry, and that better awareness and understanding of specific actions for employees to flourish at work is needed. Design/methodology/approach – We used in-depth semi-structured interviews with event professionals in the UK to investigate their individual coping strategies. To contextualise, we used the Five Ways to Wellbeing framework as an analytical tool. Findings – Our findings reveal that event professionals currently unconsciously engage in a variety of actions to maintain and enhance their mental wellbeing outside of work, but not at work. Out of the Five Ways to Wellbeing, specific actions to Connect, Be Active and Take Notice were most important to event professionals. The remaining two ways, Keep Learning and Give, were also identified in the data, although they were less prominent. Originality – In event studies, the Five Ways to Wellbeing have thus far only been applied to event attendees, volunteers and the local community. Our paper highlights how event employees can also benefit from engaging in some of the actions set out in the framework to enhance their mental wellbeing at work. Practical implications – We present recommendations for event professionals to more consciously engage with the Five Ways to Wellbeing and for employers to develop mental wellbeing initiatives that allow their employees to flourish.Peer reviewe

Making Positive Family Memories Together and Improving Quality-of-Life Through Thick Sociality and Bonding at Local Community Festivals and Events

Our study contributes to the current research on tourism and quality-of-life (QOL) by investigating Memorable Event Experiences (MEE), as a primary resource for familial bonding and memory creation. A mixed methods approach (focus groups and questionnaires) is used to explore the QOL indicators of: physical well-being, psychological/emotional well-being and relationships with family within the context of localised event experiences. Findings from this study are transferable across all aspects of the tourism system, they demonstrate that experiencing an event together as a family can facilitate collective memory creation, familial bonding, and create thick sociality or ‘we-relationships’ and can therefore enhance a family’s QOL in the long term.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Efficient and Accurate Optimal Transport with Mirror Descent and Conjugate Gradients

We design a novel algorithm for optimal transport by drawing from the entropic optimal transport, mirror descent and conjugate gradients literatures. Our scalable and GPU parallelizable algorithm is able to compute the Wasserstein distance with extreme precision, reaching relative error rates of $10^{-8}$ without numerical stability issues. Empirically, the algorithm converges to high precision solutions more quickly in terms of wall-clock time than a variety of algorithms including log-domain stabilized Sinkhorn's Algorithm. We provide careful ablations with respect to algorithm and problem parameters, and present benchmarking over upsampled MNIST images, comparing to various recent algorithms over high-dimensional problems. The results suggest that our algorithm can be a useful addition to the practitioner's optimal transport toolkit