Tower Seminar- Festivals and Social Change

Presenters: Dr Charlotte McIvor, Dominic Campbell

Chair: Dr Niamh NicGhabhann

This seminar will explore recent research on the subject of festivals and social change. Festivals are often a space for social transformation, providing a context for collective expression and the performance of identity in public space. This seminar reflects new and emerging research about the different ways festivals participate in processes of social change.

Dr Charlotte McIvor is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Towards A New Interculturalism and the co-editor of Staging Intercultural Ireland: Plays and Practitioner
Perspectives (with Matthew Spangler) and Devised Performance in Irish Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice (with Siobhán O’Gorman). Her presentation is titled:”Performing Interculturalism in Ireland Post-1990s: Aspiration and Praxis”

Dominic Campbell is co-founder of Creative Aging International. Previously he directed the Bealtaine Festival, the world’s first nationwide arts festival celebrating positive aging, was Artistic Director of Ireland’s St Patrick’s Festival raising its global profile, and co-curator of the “Theatre of” Symposia series with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, where he helped establish a network of women artists delivering change through theater in conflict zones. Currently an inaugural Atlantic Fellow for Equity and Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute he’s promoting celebration as transformational strategy by producing events in 2018 in San Francisco and in Dublin with Dublin’s Culture Connects. He remains an associate of Meet Me At The Albany, South East London’s “radical alternative to day care”.