Inequalities and Cultural Exclusion: Publics and Non-Publics of The Arts

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 9: Culture in Civic Life

Abstract

The inequality of access to certain forms of culture has stimulated the development of numerous cultural policies, themselves stemming from a goal of democratization. This has created a tension between popular and scholarly cultures or mass cultures and “highbrow culture”. How does the question of the right to culture arise when different forms of culture are equally valued, in the context of cultural democracy? There are obviously non-publics for classical culture, but can we also better understand the non-publics for mass culture or popular culture? The concept of non-public initially served to develop a critical perspective on unequal access to culture and to identify categories of people considered non-public – initially in classical culture, which was valued through state funding and public policy. Subsequently, it will have served to give a voice to different categories of people who are methodologically characterized as being non-public of a given cultural institution at a given time, while being public of other institutions or of an offer other than cultural. The analysis of their discourse is then less useful in identifying them as non-public than in understanding the reasons for their lack of interest or the constraints they face. We carried out a research project on non-publics of cultural institutions in the Nicolet-Yamaska region in Québec, Canada, who were facing issues such as chronic underfunding, competition to attract publics, problems with retaining human resources in a context of labor shortage, and the need to innovate significantly in a context of change in cultural institutions. As part of this project, we conducted 156 interviews: 93 individual interviews and 63 group interviews. The general objective of the study was to better understand the reasons non-publics give to explain their lack of interest for these six institutions, the perceptions they maintain and the actions likely to attract them.

Authors

• Marie-Claude Lapointe, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

• Jason Luckerhoff, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

• Carol-Ann Rouillard, Université de Sherbrooke