Party hard but party safe at the Montreux Jazz Festival

Lucien Delley took parti in three editions of the festival, from 2017 to 2019. FFJM Sebastien Moitrot - An EPFL PhD candidate in urban sociology spent four years working at the Montreux Jazz Festival in order to gain insights into how safety and security are managed, both within and around this world-famous event. The Montreux Jazz Festival (MJF) is an annual event that takes place over 16 days in the center of Montreux, on the shores of Lake Geneva. For the organizers, maintaining a festive atmosphere while keeping people safe and minimizing risk is a constant challenge, especially since the site is mostly outdoors and accessible to the public. PhD candidate Lucien Delley set out to understand how the event organizers manage this challenge as part of his somewhat unconventional thesis research. He spent three years, from 2017 to 2019, working at the MJF as a security coordinator while also conducting a sociology study. "Analyzing something when you're an insider is no easy task," says Delley, who carried out his research for EPFL's Urban Sociology Laboratory (LASUR).