Voting as a Socially Constructed Duty

The need to increase recorded rates of cultural participation has become a recurring trope within cultural policy discourse despite evidence that demonstrates the breadth of people's everyday participation across a range of cultural and creative practices. This chapter therefore challenges the very the notion of "non-participation" as a "problem" and instead questions the legitimacy of taste hierarchies on which established cultural policy is founded. Adopting an historical approach, the chapter begins by identifying when and how certain forms of cultural participation in the UK were rendered problematic. It argues that rather than being a problem to be solved, the continuing existence of so-called cultural non-participation is in fact central to maintaining the status quo and affirming taken for granted power relationships within cultural policy. Drawing on institutional theory the chapter goes on to examine how the discursive logics of "the arts" provides the origins of the discursive subject identity of today's cultural non-participant and constrains the possibility of alternative policy actions. It further shows how the concept of participation in cultural policy is not, as it would be understood within political science, about power and decision making, but instead is a more transactional concept centred on the invitation to "take part" in activities that others have decided are of universal value. It concludes that this has implications for who is legitimated to speak within the field of cultural policy, which can only begin to be addressed by abandoning the idea that anyone is a cultural non-participant.

Alternative action organizations (AAOs) are collective bodies engaged in carrying out alternatives to dominant socioeconomic and cultural practices through actions that aim to provide people with alternative ways of enduring day-to-day difficulties and challenges in hard economic times. They are often interpreted as merely “philanthropic” actors, although it is not rare to see them go beyond the provision of direct services to people in need and end up pursuing political goals through political means. This article focuses on the process of politicization, that is, the transition of issues from the private to the public sphere and thus the use of public forms of contention (e.g., protest) proposing public solutions at the collective level instead of private solutions at the individual level. We argue for the role of the crisis in the politicization of AAOs. In particular, we show that the appropriation of the context as a context of economic crisis in the discourse of AAOs has a visible effect on their politicization, in terms of both repertoire of actions and goals. Furthermore, we show that social solidarity organizations, those that are not inherently politicized, are the main protagonists of this crisis-triggered transition. The article draws on statistical analysis of the data collected through the coding of AAOs’ websites in Greece, Italy, and Spain.

While the prevalence of group work in higher education in Australia can be construed as a cultural or institutional practice, it has become a site of struggle for many international students who must negotiate the normative practices embedded in group work. This paper aims to investigate how six Japanese international students at Australian universities explore, negotiate and respond to the normative practices of group work through group projects. The findings reveal that students actively sought and negotiated hidden and implied normative practices of group work. Their responses to the norms were underpinned by the norms being inculcated into their dispositions or, namely, habitus, in the form of beliefs and values, which enabled them to critically examine their group practices. Additionally, when they identified a mismatch between their perceived norms and the responses of their peers, which is realised through Bourdieu’s concept of ‘hysteresis’, they were found to take leadership opportunities. We contend in this paper that when their practices or group practices are at odds with the perceived or identified norms, it induces their hysteresis encounters, which represent initiation of alternative actions and capacity to embrace learning opportunities. We also argue that the investigation into this phenomenon is vital in identifying practices that reproduce fallacies and missed opportunities or prevent students from embracing true virtues of group work.