Credit: Privat
Ekaterina Perventseva is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Cultural Management and Gender Studies (IKM), supervised by Univ.-Prof.in Mag.a Dr.in Dagmar Abfalter, MBA. She came to cultural research through linguistics: her Candidate of Philology thesis (2007) at Moscow State Linguistic University examined how meaning is constructed in illustrated literature, drawing on semiotics, visual analysis, and cognitive linguistics. Fifteen years working internationally in the cultural sector followed, often outside traditional institutional structures: curating projects, building organisations from the ground up, leading foundations through growth and change, and developing partnerships across the European festival and museum landscape. In 2024, she completed a Professional Master’s in Social Innovation and Management at the Executive Academy of Vienna University of Economics and Business, developing an early social impact assessment model — the starting point for her doctoral research on Wiener Festwochen.
ekaterina.perventseva [at] students.mdw.ac.at
The PhD project, “Assessing the Social Impact of Large-Scale Urban Festivals: The Case of Wiener Festwochen,” begins from a recognition now widely shared in policy discourse: that cultural institutions, festivals included, make an essential social and civic contribution. However, assessing and articulating this contribution is a different matter. Taking Wiener Festwochen as its case, the question the research asks is: how can festivals’ social impact be assessed in ways that balance accountability demands with qualitative depth, institutional learning, and practical feasibility? The project integrates international expert consultation, a 75-year historical baseline of the festival’s evolution, and iterative co-creation with the festival’s stakeholders across three consecutive editions (2026–2028), testing indicators directly with participants. The final aim is transferability: findings intended to extend beyond this single case to comparable large-scale urban festivals.