Last Wednesday, December 10, 2025, at 17:00 h, Pablo Soria Arancón successfully defended his doctoral thesis in Room 55.309 at the Poblenou Campus of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in a hybrid event that was also broadcast online. The thesis, supervised by Dr. Carles Feixa i Pàmpols, is entitled «The festive state of exception: raves and freeparties in the Spanish state (1990-2025)».

The work draws on Giorgio Agamben's theory of the state of exception to propose that the phenomenon of freeparties — illegal raves — constitutes one of the last expressions of Western anomic festivals, in line with historical traditions such as the carnival or the charivari. This anomic dimension would explain the difficulty of integrating freeparties into the legal framework and the tensions they generate in liberal democracies, placing the conflict primarily in the realm of law.

Through a collaborative, intersubjective and dialogical ethnography —in which the author, as a native researcher, has involved his consultants in all phases of the work—, the thesis traces the genealogy of rave and club cultures in Spain and other contexts, and analyses in detail freeparty culture and its central device: the illegal rave. Soria Arancón interprets these spaces as a framework of legal exceptionalism constructed by youth itself, functioning as a vehicle for inclusion and exclusion vis-à-vis the adult world, re-signifying youth's “bare life” within the Western political project.

The committee is chaired by Dr. Mònica Figueras Maz (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), with Dr. Amparo Lasén Díaz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) as secretary and Dr. Macarena García-González (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) as member. In their comments, the committee highlighted that it is a heterodox and courageous thesis in its writing style; they underscored the value of addressing, from autoethnography, practices in which the researcher himself is involved; and they emphasized the social and epistemic relevance of the topic, little studied in the Spanish-speaking world and of great interest in the media agenda and public policies on nightlife and health. Dr. Pablo Soria Arancón received the highest grade—excellent—upon completing his defense.

 
Dr, Carles Feixa, Dr. Pablo Soria Arancón, Dr. Amparo Lasén Díaz, Dr. Macarena García González, Dr. Mònica Figueras Maz.