CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP
Cultural citizenship is an attempt to develop a new interpretation of the concept of citizenship that is more attuned to the changing social context in which the cultural field becomes more relevant. Therefore, the concept should also reflect the rising importance of cultural components in complex civic identities.
One of the innovations proposed in the concept of cultural citizenship is overcoming the limited institutional framework of citizenship, defined primarily through legal rights and political participation. According to Delanty (2002), in order for citizenship to become a relevant category, it should concern lifestyles, cultural models, and discourses that residents use to explain society and their place in it, construct their aspirations, and open spaces for articulating new rights from the domain of culture.
This is particularly important since, in contemporary societies, marginal social groups face discrimination, even though they have legally equal status. Cultural citizenship thus becomes a cognitive instrument that serves to clearly recognise the boundaries and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in a specific cultural context. The symbolic boundaries that differentiate between full and second-class citizens, by applying the changed concept become an element of criticism that strives to build a model of the full membership of all citizens (Beaman, 2016).
Another component of contemporary cultural contexts is that brought about by new social movements concerning gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, and disability. They changed the dominant cultural construction of reality and connected the processes of exploitation and discrimination with segments of culture. In addition to access to resources, social inequality is determined by the possibilities to manage the symbolic codes of civil society culture (Stevenson, 2003a).
This changed cultural context is certainly also determined by globalisation trends. According to Stevenson (2003b), this requires the concept of cultural citizenship to define new forms of inclusive public space that would promote cosmopolitan cultural practices, introduce the principle of autonomy in management, sensibility for recognising the social struggles of the marginalised, and models of dialogical engagement. In this way, the social space becomes a place where the rights to protection, political representativeness, civil justice, but also the right to choose a lifestyle and propagate cultural identity are recognised.
Approaches to cultural citizenship
In understanding cultural citizenship, two general approaches have crystallised, from which multiple interpretations arise on a more concrete level. The first is the sociological one, which places culture in the central place for promoting cultural citizenship. In this approach, new cultural needs and problems of individuals and groups are recognised, and inclusion is introduced into the discussion through identity, narratives, codes and discourses of belonging and diversity. Another general approach, which comes from the political theory of cultural citizenship, directly relates citizenship to diversity and aims to expand the formal framework for including excluded or marginalised individuals or social groups.
On a more concrete level, there are many approaches to understanding cultural citizenship that focus on some of the dimensions of culture. One group can be classified into approaches that believe that cultural competencies are crucial for establishing the equality of citizens in a particular society (Bennett, 2001). The development of the creative and artistic capacities of citizens is a deepened variant of this approach, and cultural policies should be aimed at it. Another group of approaches focuses on the rights that should be guaranteed to minorities (Rosaldo, 1999) or that would allow all citizens to participate in the national culture (Turner, 2001). The third group of approaches is a kind of development of cultural citizenship as a means of adopting and monitoring the lifestyle of a specific group, but also the coexistence of majority and minority cultural identities (Zapata-Barrero, 2016). The last group of approaches emphasises the importance of struggle and conflict in the dynamics of cultural citizenship change. It is considered that cultural citizenship is a field of struggle for a democratic society that provides space for diversity and a conflict zone around the right to equal access to the production, distribution and consumption of culture (Stevenson, 2010; Wang, 2013). (NK)