Page 61 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP

popular or kitsch culture in order to oppose existing cultural capital, is
naive. A major re-assessment of the way cultural capital is necessary,
because the scale, global reach and economic importance of popular
culture are nowso great that it is a determining force both
economically and culturally in its own right.

See also: Class

Further reading: Bourdieu (1984)

CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP

Publicly acknowledged rights and obligations associated with
cultural identity. Citizenship theory is concerned with how we
conceive the rights and obligations implicated in membership of a
political community, as well as the identity that it confers on us. It
focuses upon the necessity of such a membership either in the legal
sense, to make society more governable, or as something to be
desired for the purposes of inclusion, nationality or equality.
Cultural citizenship concerns movement from the latter towards the
former, a tendency that has become increasingly prominent since
World War II.
Citizenship theory has experienced a revival in political theory
over the last decade in relation to unresolved questions surrounding
identity politics and group rights. As Kymlicka and Norman write:
‘it is a natural evolution in political discourse because the concept of
citizenship seems to integrate the demands of justice and community
membership – the central concepts of political philosophy in the
1970s and 1980s respectively’ (1994: 352). Furthermore, globalisation
has brought into question the nation-state’s claim to be the sole
provider of citizenship rights, a result of the increasingly global
nature of economics, human rights (treaties) and the movement of
people across borders for work, exile or refuge. Whether citizenship
remains a concept that should be pursued and reconceptualised as a
result of the changing political landscape or whether we are
experiencing a ‘breakdown in citizenship’ is a key theoretical
problem of our time.
T. H. Marshall (1965) set out three categories of citizenship rights,
which have remained the conceptual pillars around which much
citizenship theory is built. For Marshall these rights have been
accumulated over the course of history:

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