Dr Louise Platt

My profile

Biography

I am an interdisciplinary researcher and Senior Lecturer in Festival Management at Manchester Metropolitan University. My research focus is on placemaking and festivity with a particular focus on walking practices, processional cultures, and experiences of festivals and leisure spaces. My work predominantly draws on cultural geography, dance/performance theory, and poststructural philosophy to elucidate a more fluid understanding of place and community using festivity as a lens. I teach festival studies at both undergraduate and postgraduate level and supports PhD students on festival-related topics.

External examiner roles

External examiner for the University of Manchester

Editorial Board membership

Co-Editor of International Journal of Event and Festival Management

Leisure Studies Journal editorial board member

World Leisure Journal editorial board member

Membership of professional associations

Fellow of the Institute of Place Management.

Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts

Interests and expertise

My research interests include:

Festivals and placemaking
Walking practices and wellbeing
Leisure practices
Qualitative and creative methods.

Projects

Mapping everyday walking of early families: A co-created project (Partnership with Dr. Anna Powell @ University of Huddersfield

Through mapping everyday walking practices of early families (families with preschool aged children), this  project seeks to understand the relationship between walking and wellbeing in families in a place-based context. This aligns with the UK Govt levelling-up agenda where place-based solutions for health inequalities and wellbeing benefit local communities not just socially and culturally but also economically. Using creative mapping and mobile methods this project will focus on parents walking with young children, and the relationships that are formed between bodies and spaces, reflecting on varying experiences and interpretations localities. The result will be an artist led workshop with families which will create maps for a final exhibition.

A Manifesto for Walking Mothers: Time, space and leisure of walking with infants

Though walking with a baby as a mother may seem mundane, it is an emotionally and logistically complex practice (Clement and Waitt, 2018) further compounded during the lockdown restrictions in Manchester, UK through 2020/2021. This project, inspired by time-geography (Hägerstrand, 1982) as method, examines how diagramming in comic book form (Carruthers Thomas, 2018) might facilitate a more substantive understanding of walking as a distinctive, spatiotemporal experience of mothering. The aim is to not only use the comic book form as a user-friendly method of research dissemination but also as methodology particularly to experiment with sequence, simultaneity, and subjectivities (Kuttner, Weaver-Hightower and Sousanis, 2021) to examine the gendered spatio-temporal relations revealed through leisure and walking practices for mothers.

Teaching

Level 6:
Events and The Creative City
Contemporary and Strategic Issues in the Events Industry

PhD Students:
I supervise PhD students on topics related to festivals and place.

Courses

Supervision

I supervise PhD students in the areas of festivals and cultural tourism.

Research outputs

My research interests include: walking, gender, festivals and placemaking