Risks & Responsibilities: The Complexities of Enabling Safety & Harm Reduction at Music Festivals

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the risks and subsequent harm reduction strategies that occur at music festivals with a focus on Western Canada. Music festivals are liminal spaces that form temporary communities in bounded locations, and as such are sites that see decreased inhibitions and increased risks. Using critical-interpretive medical anthropology as the framework, these risks are analyzed and grouped based on their impact − risks to the individual body, physically and mentally, and risks to the community as a whole. Instead of looking at each risk in isolation, a holistic approach in this context specifically is essential due to the interrelated and compounding nature of these potential harms. This framework also provides the basis for the second half of this thesis, which interrogates the entangled and often contradicting responsibilities at play for mitigating these risks.\n\nUsing a rapid ethnographic research design, three music festivals were chosen as the field sites for this research, with each festival located in a different province (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan) to allow for comparative policy analysis. This comparison helped to illuminate just how varied the experiences at different festivals can be. There is largely no formal regulation on risk mitigation at mass gathering events such as music festivals, outside of fire or alcohol safety. This absence forces festival organizers to engage with the securitization of habitat, as per Nikolas Rose, resulting in different harm reduction strategies and risk priorities at each event. In turn, through governmentality, many patrons have internalized responsibility for both themselves and those around them. Additionally, festivals and governments with prohibitionist stances on drug use, rather than harm reduction grounded in prevention and realism, are unintentionally contributing to more dangerous risk behaviours. My research demonstrates that all the different parties involved − individuals, communities, organizers, and governments − need to communicate and be on the same page in order to create and enable sustainable safety at music festivals. This is currently not the case in Canada, where criminalization and enforcement are still fundamental structures hindering harm reduction, contributing to the escalating risks created by the unregulated drug market.

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