Landscapes and Cyberscapes of the Commons: Scottish Festivals in the Pandemic and Beyond

This paper investigates how Scottish festivals chose to implement commoning practices in both digital and hybrid spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilising a deductive thematic analysis approach, the authors draw out emergent themes from a series of interviews with festivals conducted between October 2020 and September 2021 to develop a set of aspects or commonalities between commoning practices for digital and hybrid festivals. The authors examine how some of these commoning practices are directly linked to traditional understandings of the cultural commons, such as the sharing of physical and knowledge resources with other organizations or shared forms of governance. While describing festivals as “commons” in themselves would be reductive and conceptually contentious, this paper argues not only that festivals can include commoning practices, but that these are inherently relevant to their identity and audiences that, even in times of extreme operational restrictions, these remain central to their activities.