Biography

Alba Colombo research has been focused on the analysis of festival and events as contemporary social and cultural expressions observing issues such as the transformative social capacity of festivals, events understood as acts of implementation of public policies, or the evolution of events in the framework of uncertain times.

Currently this has been specialized in two different fields; observing contemporary events participation (as cultural activities) on the frame of traditional and popular culture in Spain; but also analyzing event and festival impacts, from intangible cultural and social ones to rethinking processes and methodologies to evaluate those effects. She is currently a senior lecturer and researcher at the Open University of Catalonia and also has teaching experience at other universities such as the University of Roskilde (Denmark), the Menendez y Pelayo University (Santander) and the International University of Catalonia.

In her thesis entitled “Cultural Impact Perception, A Model Proposal for Intangible Impact Assessment, a proposal for evaluating public policy through the analysis of cultural impacts of events understood as acts of implementation,” proposes a methodology for analyzing qualitative impacts such as cultural impacts generated by events.

She participates as evaluator in different national and international programs, such as Creative Europe Program of the European Commission, different programs managed by the Agencia de Gesti. d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR) and Agencia per a la Qualitat de Sistema Universitari de Catalunya (AQU).

She is currently co-director of the Accion CULTURA editorial collection edited by Oberta Publishing and is a jury member of the Ramon Ros Roca International Award for Cultural Management. She has been peer review of indexed journals such as Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events and Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change.