A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival Website: A Cultural Criminology of Peace- and Community-Building

Social settings that are low in interpersonal crime offer an opportunity to understand social control and, moreover, peace-making. Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival held each summer since 2002 in Manchester, Tennessee, is a contemporary example of a peaceable provisional community. To analyze the culture of Bonnaroo, I undertook a multimodal discourse analysis, which is as a systematic analysis of all texts and images (Fairclough 2013; Machin & Mayr 2012). I paid particular attention to how the website was able to foster community via what they communicated and how – through overall website design or visual semiotics, and images, as well as verb processes, style of language, presentation of social actors, transitivity, and presupposition in the text. A cultural criminological framework can be used to understand the aesthetics of peaceful living and resistance that occurs on the festival grounds. Upon analysis of the festival website, three themes emerged: opposition to harm, extending and involving the community, and ethics of early childhood. The discourse of Bonnaroo encourages its community members to think beyond our current system to envision what is possible at the festival and beyond.