Kelci Mohr | University of Alberta (original) (raw)
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Thesis Chapters by Kelci Mohr
This exploratory work investigates the “transformational festival,” a contemporary form of celebr... more This exploratory work investigates the “transformational festival,” a contemporary form of celebratory leisure that revolves around music, the arts, community, and co-creativity. By integrating interpretative phenomenological analysis with methods from arts-based research, critical ethnography, and storytelling, I seek to understand how life-changing processes may be enabled or supported through the construction of three particular festival timespaces: Shambhala, Astral Harvest, and Intention Alberta. The research is focused on a group of festival goers who consider these kinds of events important for their leisure lives and their greater (trans)personal development. This work queries how transformational festivals are perceived, experienced, and why they might be meaningful for this group. It affirms that people are seeking community, ecstatic rituals, and spiritual elements within festivals, and suggests the importance of adding transpersonal considerations to current leisure discourses that focus on individual social-psychological interactions. The interdisciplinary and creative nature of the project challenges dominant metanarratives by adding alternative accounts of how people are enriching their lives through leisure experiences on the margins of awareness in academia and normative society.
This exploratory work investigates the “transformational festival,” a contemporary form of celebr... more This exploratory work investigates the “transformational festival,” a contemporary form of celebratory leisure that revolves around music, the arts, community, and co-creativity. By integrating interpretative phenomenological analysis with methods from arts-based research, critical ethnography, and storytelling, I seek to understand how life-changing processes may be enabled or supported through the construction of three particular festival timespaces: Shambhala, Astral Harvest, and Intention Alberta. The research is focused on a group of festival goers who consider these kinds of events important for their leisure lives and their greater (trans)personal development. This work queries how transformational festivals are perceived, experienced, and why they might be meaningful for this group. It affirms that people are seeking community, ecstatic rituals, and spiritual elements within festivals, and suggests the importance of adding transpersonal considerations to current leisure discourses that focus on individual social-psychological interactions. The interdisciplinary and creative nature of the project challenges dominant metanarratives by adding alternative accounts of how people are enriching their lives through leisure experiences on the margins of awareness in academia and normative society.