Organisational disorientation and gender-based violence at UK music festivals

Gender-based violence (GBV) remains prevalent within music festivals despite increasing industry attention to safety and prevention. Existing research has focused primarily on festival attendees and interpersonal risk, with far less attention paid to the workers who sustain festival environments and respond to harm as it unfolds. Drawing on feminist phenomenology and an ethnographic study of UK music festival, this paper develops the concept of organisational disorientation to explain how GBV becomes difficult to recognise, interpret and sustain as organisational knowledge within carnivalesque festival environments organised around pleasure, movement and atmosphere. We argue that the carnivalesque smokescreen creates the conditions under which organisational disorientation becomes possible. The study draws on 24 trauma-informed interviews with festival workers alongside embodied ethnographic fieldwork conducted across five UK music festivals while leading a welfare-based GBV response team. Findings show that workers encountered GBV through three interrelated dimensions of disorientation: bodily, interpretative and procedural. Harm was often sensed bodily before it became organisationally actionable, while disclosures were redirected, minimised or absorbed into processes prioritising continuity, reputation and ‘vibe’ management. The paper makes three contributions to feminist organisational studies. First, it extends Ahmed’s concept of disorientation into organisational analysis to show how violence becomes obscured through organisational conditions. Second, it shifts festival and GBV scholarship towards the labour and relational work of frontline workers positioned within masculinised organisational structures. Third, it theorises the carnivalesque not as a neutral backdrop to violence, but as an organisational arrangement shaping what can be recognised and responded to as harm.