This proposed conference paper is based on research conducted as part of a PhD in Education and Training Sciences since October 2023.

Our work examines French public cultural policies. Since the second half of the twentieth century, these policies have largely focused on disseminating what is considered French heritage—namely “artistic and high culture ” (Liot, 2018), historically associated primarily with social elites. In response to concerns about declining attendance at traditional cultural institutions (Arnaud et al., 2024), combined with the rise of new practices linked to digital technologies, cultural policies have intensified their efforts to “democratize” culture among younger generations. However, the direction of this effort is shifting.

This paper questions the nature of that transformation : does cultural democratization still aim to provide access to culture for all, or is it increasingly oriented toward a normative transmission of French heritage?

After several decades dedicated to cultural dissemination, connecting audiences with artistic works, and expanding cultural infrastructure across the country, cultural policies today seem to be moving toward a logic of protection against the fragmentation of national identity. Culture is mobilized as a vehicle for national integration, even assimilation (Park, 1964).

Through the study of a program designed to democratize orchestral music practice among young people considered distanced from culture, this research enables us to investigate how the stakes of cultural democratization are being reconfigured. We examine the gaps between institutional discourses on cultural democratization and its objectives, and the realities experienced in the field by both beneficiaries and professionals.

In parallel, we also seek to account for the different strategies, specific to each category of actors, used to appropriate (Bonasio & Veyrac, 2022) a national program. We will highlight strategies of social mobility (Amico, 2017) pursued by beneficiaries, as well as strategies of protection and dissemination, and even a will to assimilate audiences from immigrant backgrounds, on the part of professionals and institutional actors. In this sense, we will analyze the effects of this new form of cultural democratization on the identity construction of the individuals who benefit from the program under study. Above all, we will focus on the “place” (Bordes & Ruel, 2019) left to each category of actors in the process of appropriating a national prescription.

This research is rooted in the interactionist approach (Goffman, 1991) associated with sociologists of the Chicago School. The theoretical framework allows us to place individuals at the center of each stage of the research, considering that the situations studied result from the ways people interact and attribute meaning to what they experience. In this respect, we will draw on the theory of “thick description” (Geertz, 1998), which involves describing facts in relation to the symbolic meanings of each element, constructed within a given social and cultural context.

Our analysis also incorporates the notion of cultural rights (Lucas, 2022), which entails a shift in approach: the goal is no longer only to make culture accessible, but to recognize each person as a cultural subject, carrying values, practices, and legitimate forms of expression.

Through a strongly inductive approach (Olivier de Sardan, 2013) and the participatory methodology adopted, we seek to consider different forms of knowledge on an equal footing. Scientific knowledge steps back without disappearing, making room for lay, practical, or experiential knowledge. In this way, “intersubjective knowledge” (Anadón, 2007, p. 218), referring to knowledge co-constructed between researchers and participants throughout the research process through dialogue, exchanges of viewpoints, situated interactions, and shared experience, can emerge.

This research is grounded in a socio-ethnographic approach (Bordes, 2015), which combines ethnographic data-collection tools with sociological interpretive frameworks. This method requires prolonged immersion, here within a national children’s orchestra program that seeks to democratize access to orchestral music practice in priority neighbourhoods. The research methodology is grounded in the concept of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), which makes it possible to examine the power relations that shape the collective production of knowledge. The aim is to enable the sharing and recognition of multiple forms of knowledge, without hierarchical ordering, by building common spaces for understanding and action. Drawing on the crossing of knowledges approach (Brun, 2017), a stance of listening and co-learning, combined with an interactionist perspective (Goffman, 1991), takes shape through long-term immersion and the sharing of participants’ everyday lives. The researcher adopts a position of stepping back and becomes a learner of the field. This posture helps counterbalance subjectivity by integrating a multiplicity of perspectives into the analysis and by mobilizing “thick description” (Geertz, 1998) to account for what is implicit and invisible, as well as the meaning behind facts and interactions. Throughout the research process, the ongoing search for the “right distance” (Brun et al., 2014, p. 117) is an integral part of the researcher’s reflexive work. Practically speaking, we created collective spaces for the emergence and cross-fertilization of knowledge through the development of a consultation process (Beuret, 2006). Over one year, seven socio-cultural organizations were involved, along with around one hundred children and families and about twenty professionals. This process was organized in stages and remained adaptable to field realities. First, we conducted peer workshops, fifteen in total. This was followed by seven intermediate plenary feedback sessions, using varied formats adapted to the diversity of the audience. These exchanges were accompanied by the sharing of a written document translated into English, French, and Arabic, enabling the widest possible appropriation of the initial lines of inquiry. Participants’ reactions and feedback were incorporated into the dataset. The analysis is built on a corpus comprising outputs from the collective workshops, participant observations conducted over several years, and individual interviews, allowing us to articulate the viewpoints of the program’s different actors. We began with a thematic analysis (Bardin, 2013), through which conceptualizing categories emerged (Paillé & Mucchielli, 2021).

This research offers an updated understanding of the stakes of cultural democratization, taking into account the needs and expectations of the people directly concerned, the professionals’ capacity to work with, and recompose, the existing framework, and the institutional injunctions that shape the policy environment. First, we wish to emphasize the autonomy of each category of actors in the way they appropriate spaces of cultural democratization. While prescriptions are clearly formulated, they are systematically reconfigured in practice, generating tensions that in turn produce strategic effects. Families facing social and economic precarity, mostly from first or second-generation immigrant backgrounds, don’t adopt a passive stance. On the contrary, they consistently pursue social mobility, which is facilitated by participation in cultural democratization programs. They hope to offer new frames (Goffman, 1991) for the generations to come, fully aware that their own trajectories have often placed them in situations of difficulty. Nevertheless, a symbolic hierarchy of cultures remains at work. Classical music, and, through it, high culture, continues to be overvalued in comparison with young people’s cultural practices. This hierarchy is closely tied to the objective of preserving a French heritage and a homogeneous national identity. These issues primarily concern institutional actors and those who set the agenda for the democratization of culture. Yet they are also widely carried by professionals, who tend to reproduce the model they are familiar with and through which they themselves were recognized. These findings on cultural democratization and the reconfiguration of its objectives are supported by an interactional analysis that highlights a process of reciprocal socialization (Bordes & Ruel, 2019) between audiences and institutions. This reciprocal socialization constitutes an in-between space, within which cultural rights can be made tangible through the emergence of new cultural practices and renewed stakes, within a program whose governance remains relatively constrained and compartmentalized.

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