Kirsty Usher

kiu@aber.ac.uk

Department of Geography and Earth Sciences,
Aberystwyth University

Lead supervisor:
Prof Peter Merriman

Other supervisor(s):

• Dr Gareth Hoskins

Start date: September 2022 (Part time)

Award: General

Subject Pathway:
Human Geography

Thematic Cluster:
Place, Environment and Development Cluster

The Travelling Manual Labourer: A Qualitative Study of the Anarchic Working Culture of the Festival Rigger and their Hidden Cultural Impacts

Festivals, circuses and traveller fairs have a long history, and yet the social worlds and working practices of these mobile communities have received remarkably little attention in the social sciences. Drawing upon my contacts and experience working as a professional festival tent rigger and seamstress for ten years, along with my training in human geography, I will undertake an in-depth study of the social and economic practices, work cultures, and spaces of these mobile communities, focussing on Travelling Manual Labourers as well as festival riggers, as a catch all term. This transitory group of workers face significant social and economic challenges, and alongside the key academic aims of the project, I hope to draw conclusions that will be of benefit to employees in the sector as well as looking at how this might apply to broader policies in the work sector.

I use a a range of creative methods in my approach to research, including filmed footage from my ethnographic field studies, in-depth interviews and archival research. The filmed footage includes first person perspectives through the use of Go-Pro style attachments for the participants.

Some of my central research questions are:

• How and why do festival riggers enter their profession? What are their skills and how have they acquired them?
• When looking at this working culture on a broader scale across the UK, where does it fit in our modern version of Capitalism? Does it contribute to arguments for anarchistic alternatives to the capitalist model?
• How is it regulated as a sector? Does it need regulating? Are there gendered pay disparities?
•  Using public health policy to guide my question framework, how do they perceive their work-life in terms of wellbeing?
•  How are travelling manual labourers mobile and immobile at various points? What are the transnational movements of these workers? How are they included and excluded from mainstream society?
• What, if any affinities and relations do these mobile workers have with other mobile subjects in travelling/working communities?
• How has legislation presented barriers to their life and livelihood, and how have specific historic events become enshrined in festival ‘folklore’?

Biography