Cultural Citizenship

The idea of cultural citizenship has emerged through three main phases of debate. There was an attempt to extend the categories of citizenship to include questions of culture. There has been attempt to link sociology and cultural studies in the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall. According to Bryan Turner ( 2001) this debate was concerned with the participation of citizens within explicitly national culture. During phase one of the cultural citizenship debate issues related to the commodification of culture, access to the relevant cultural capital and the decline in cultural authority of the traditional arts dominated. Cultural citizenship was a normative category that aimed to develop the conditions for a popular participatory democracy and a culturally inclusive society. Pakulski ( 1997) argued that from children to the disabled and from ethnic communities to diverse sexualities there were new demands being made for representation without normalizing distortion. The second phase of the debate was more focused on issues related to cultural recognition. There are now signs that the debate on cultural citizenship could be entering into a third phase beyond questions related to identity to include the neo liberal assault on cultural practices more generally.

Sources :

Pakulski ,J.(1997) Cultural Citizenship . Citizenship Studies 1

Turner,B.S. (2001) Outline of a general theory of cultural citizenship .In Stevensson,N (ed) Culture and Citizenship ,Sage

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