DIVERSITY OF AUDIENCES
Audience diversity refers to audiences from various backgrounds, including race, ethnic origin, geographic location, age, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender identity, and abilities.
The significance of the variety of cultural audiences is frequently discussed in relation to concepts of accessible and inclusive culture and cultural democracy. As cultural policies have begun to pay more attention to the problem of audience homogeneity (especially in the publicly financed sector), there has been an increase in the number of calls for arts and cultural organisations to become more democratic and inclusive, to engage under-represented groups, and even to act as agents of social change. This has resulted in the development of a wide range of initiatives, programs, and projects aimed at reaching out to the audience in novel ways (e.g., Creative Europe 2018). In order to address the needs and lifestyles of various social groups, arts and cultural organisations have employed a variety of strategies, such as hosting events in "non-traditional" spaces, emphasising the creation and presentation of work by underrepresented groups, developing outreach projects for specific populations, fusing leisure and education with cultural enrichment, and forming partnerships with community-based organisations. In addition, the cultural sector is confronted with the challenge of developing projects for audience research and new marketing and promotion methods. The emphasis on audience-centered or target-led approaches in the cultural sector has grown even more potent due to the development of the cultural economy paradigm, in which the audience is viewed more as consumers or users. Cultural and arts organisations are thus faced with the task of reaching a larger and more diverse audience.
However, discussions regarding audience development and cultural policy have questioned the murky and convoluted roles that arts and cultural organisations play in society. The debate centers on the discrepancy between audience policies and the likelihood of their implementation. According to Kawashima (2006), cultural organisations should "critically self-examine the extent to which they have been committed to becoming Inclusive Organisations." She points out that cultural organisations would need to thoroughly review their history in society and their past and current practices if they were to become truly inclusive. Furthermore, the need for a new conceptualisation of organisational work in the cultural sector is questioned, as is the capacity and readiness of cultural and arts organisations to achieve the set audience diversification objectives (Conner, 2013; Mandel, 2019; Glow, Kershaw, and Reason, 2021). (MS)