Developing the ‘Cultural Risk Assessment’: teaching events management with a focus on diverse faith communities

This paper emerges from our teaching (UKCEM Level 5 Events Management module, Celebration, Ritual & Culture) that has enabled us to contribute to the AHRC-funded BRIC-19 project. The wider BRIC-19 project examines how British religious communities have adapted to living in the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting restrictions that have been imposed on our society.
Funerals, weddings, birth rituals, and religious events are vital to people’s psychological wellbeing and sense of community, especially given the sense of unease created by the pandemic.
The impact of Western enlightenment, white positioning of cultural capital has resulted in a continuing need to provide equitable spaces for diverse groups of people and to assess the impacts of failure to create culturally sensitive / aware spaces that are able to meet ethical, moral and legal obligations for equality, diversity and inclusion. The eventization of faith continues to evolve in the post-pandemic world.
Through our teaching, we have developed an innovative Cultural Risk Assessment model that supports the identification and management of cultural risks in an event. The intended outcomes for our project are:
1) to present processes that support policy, procedures and guidelines for faith organisations to apply a practical cultural risk assessment tool to their physical and virtual spaces, events and rituals.
2) to support diversity, equality and inclusion planning and provision and to deracialise religious and faith related spaces whether static, virtual or those created by venuefication.
3) to develop a deeper perspective of people’s lived experiences of navigating cultural spaces