Exclusive and Homogenous? An Empirical Case Study of the International InScience Film Festival in Nijmegen

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2020-08-11

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en

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This thesis examines a thematic film festival by questioning and hypothesizing its exclusivity. The thesis consists of a quantitative analysis that looks into the festival’s visitor demographics and a qualitative analysis that explores the event’s organizational structures and marketing approaches. Viewing the results through the sociological perspectives of Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Florida, as well as Marijke de Valck’s reception studies, puts the empirical data in context. The theoretical contextualization explains the relation between socioeconomic backgrounds and cultural inclinations. The quantitative research adapts a sociological approach to segment the festival’s participants into categories, based on their demographics, as either infrequent or frequent visitors., the segmentation indicates the frequent spectators as highly educated and occupied individuals. These densely clustered data point to homogeneity among visitors with a cultural -and economic capital. The overrepresented demographics translate to Florida’s creative class. Through an interview with the festival director, a correlation between the festival’s organizational practices and the demographic data are recognized and concluded. The study illustrates the flows of festival attendees and points out the challenging aspects of targeting a festival outside of its niche. Fostering new audiences from those with less cultural and economic capital prove difficult.

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