Diversity and cultural policy: cultural citizenship as a tool for inclusion

At the crossroads of citizenship, cultural and diversity studies, I enter in the emerging debate on cultural citizenship. Culture is seen as a channel for diversity inclusion, and cultural policy carries the function of enhancing citizenship. My reasoning will follow two steps. First, in overviewing the recent literature, I identify two main drivers making cultural citizenship: the democratic/equality and the identity/national drivers. However, I will note that the debate is concentrated in the plurality of meanings of ‘culture’, and not, as I will argue as a second step, in the plurality of citizenship traditions: a liberal, a communitarian and a republican one. This view is at the basis of different approaches of cultural policies when we focus on them as enhancing cultural citizenship in diversity contexts. At the end, I will also contend that this can ground an interpretative framework capable of distinguishing current social practices and policies.