Glossary

The term accessibility, primarily associated with the disability advocacy movement, refers to the universal accessibility of public goods or premises, to be achieved through a policy requiring real or symbolic barriers to be dismantled and disabilities to be neutralized. Accessibility would demand a comprehensive engagement with the manifold restrictions and closures associated with social spaces, something which seldom occurs to a sufficient degree. Many studies have demonstrated that the real and symbolic barriers to accessing museum spaces are considerable; they are also, as Pierre Bourdieu’s work suggests, an essential aspect of the field, which may constitute the chief obstacle to achieving accessibility.

Action Research has become an influential form of research in the social sciences – mainly in English-language scholarship, but also in francophone, Latin American and, increasingly, German-language research. Action Research is characterized primarily by the fact that it involves the active attempt to change the social reality it is investigating and push the boundaries between the researcher and the people under study, the research and its subject. Social scientists first began developing methods and strategies for Participatory Action Research (PAR) in the 1960s. These approaches seek to solve problems and initiate transformation “through research into questions arising in daily working life [conducted] by individuals acting professionally, alone or in a team. Of key importance in this approach is the valorisation of the knowledge of practitioners relative to ‘expert knowledge’ generated outside the specific context of work” (Landkammer 2012, p. 200).

Britishness is a somewhat hazy term referring to the quality of being British or, more accurately, for the codes evoking British identity. Like any other concept identifying a nation, Britishness is a discursive construct that must be produced, primarily through the definition of that which is deemed non-British. Britishness has a political role in the United Kingdom, which was and is far from homogenous. Stuart Hall, a pioneer in the field of Cultural Studies, speaks about the link between Britishness and racism, a frequent aspect of Britishness which people often wish to forget: “It is in the sugar you stir; it is in the sinews of the famous British ‘sweet tooth’; it is in the tea-leaves at the bottom of the next ‘British’ cuppa’” (Procter 2004, p. 82).

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu distinguished among various forms of capital, which consist of different resources which individuals and organizations bring with them to social spaces: economic, social and cultural capital. The former, economic capital, refers to material assets (property, money), while the latter two refer to intangible resources: relationships and networks in the case of social capital and refinement and education (degree, title) in the case of cultural capital. The complex interrelations among these forms of capital comprise symbolic capital (prestige, privileged status) which an individual can draw on in social spaces.

The term cognitive capitalism was coined as a term for the shift in capitalist economies since the 1970s, which has been characterised by a decline in industrial production. Intangible labour constitutes a key productive force producing “so-called intangible goods, meaning, knowledge, information, communication, relationships or emotional stimulants” (Hardt, Negri 2004, p. 126). The tertiary or service sector of the economy, which includes education, the arts and culture, is increasingly being caught up in the context of exploitation. In cognitive capitalism, material or manual labour does not become insignificant, rather it is delegated to non-privileged regions or non-privileged workers in accordance with the principles governing the international division of labour.

“Culturalization refers to the practice of identifying culture as the essential, central and determining explanation for (individuals’) actions, attitudes, modes of behaviour, conflicts or modes of expression. The concept of culture is often ethnicized in this context, so that, for instance, individuals are reduced to their – presumed– ‘Turkish culture’. Culturalization reinforces the division of society into two groups, those who belong (‘us’) and those who do not (‘the others’) and reproduces stereotypes and attributes” (Informations- und Dokumentationszentrum für Antirassismusarbeit Düsseldorf, → Glossar). Culturalization, which makes culture the “central signifier” (Grimm, Ronneberger) for the analysis of societal relationships, also tends to recast social issues as cultural issues and reinforce social inequalities by framing them as cultural differences.

“The practitioner of deconstruction works within the terms of the system but in order to breach it.” (Culler 1988/1982 pp. 95/86). Deconstruction can be seen as critical work on the powerful oppositions within a discourse. Derrida describes the deconstructive gesture as follows: “...in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other […] or has ‘the upper hand’. To deconstruct the opposition is, first of all, at a given moment, to overturn the hierarchy.” (Derrida 1986/1978, p. 88/56). To avoid the risk of pinning down meanings, deconstructive practices remain in motion, seeking to shift meanings rather than specify them.

This term refers to a museum’s official guidelines and rules which relate to the social and “cultural” diversity which the cultural institution is committed to embracing. A diversity policy formulates the institution’s approach toward the inclusion of and communications with individuals or groups that have been characterized as different on the basis of their gender, race, religion, class, ethnicity etc. Like the concept of diversity itself, the discourse on diversity policies has been criticized by many for tending to ignore or conceal discrimination while celebrating diversity.

This controversial term refers to a growing interest evinced in the art field, and especially in the curatorial field, in educational approaches, primarily those developed in critical and liberation pedagogy in the tradition of Paulo Freire or Ivan Illich and in approaches associated with post-structuralist educational philosophies, such as that of Jacques Rancière. However, people were thinking and writing about the relationship between art and education long before the advent of the current educational turn: “The discovery by curators and art scholars of what had been, until recently, a marginal topic was preceded by about two hundred years of debate about the philosophy of education and practices of aesthetic education. One must hope that the current discourse will recognize those concepts and thus avoid the necessity to reinvent the wheel and the reduction of the complexity of those approaches.” (Mörsch 2009).

Ethnicity has been described by the sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall as a dynamic concept, more of an idea, a form of consciousness that is neither natural nor eternal, but a function of circumstances at a specific point in time (Hall 1999). Ethnic essentialization defines individuals on the basis of their ethnicity and the attributes associated with it, which are usually descriptors used by a dominant majority to describe people they see as different from themselves.

The use of signs produces meanings in discourses and constructs social identities, for example that of sex or gender, or at times, ethnicity. Ethnicization codes take up cliché attributes and codifications and draw on what tends to be a racist repertoire and certain types of representations and dramaturgical discourses. Defining difference in ethnic terms is associated with a tendency to legitimize social inequalities and disparities by presenting them as “natural”.

An informal abbreviation of expatriate, the word has become a common way to refer to people who live and work outside of their country of origin. However, “expat” tends to be used to describe mainly a privileged, mobile labour force in the global business world: immigrant, foreigner or Gastarbeiter (guest worker) remain stigmatizing terms reserved for socially de-privileged people, who are equally ex patrie. The fact that expats may like to live in parallel worlds, move in their own circles and seldom learn the language of the country which has taken them in, seldom elicits controversy.

There are certain occupational fields, such as the field of education, which are distinctly feminized, i.e., jobs in the field are largely occupied by women. In particular, occupations in the service sector that demand certain social skills are characterized as women’s occupations. Fields in which women are over-represented are often underpaid, while the sector of unpaid labour (housework, nursing care) is also extremely feminized. Moreover, a closer examination of the feminization of occupational fields reveals a highly specific tendency: feminization decreases with increasing status and salary. Thus, one should bear in mind the differences in the gender ratios among kindergarten teachers and university rectors when speaking of the feminization of the education sector.

As defined by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a social field is any sphere of social life, for example, the fields of the economy, politics or art. Each field adheres to its own logic and rules. These logics and rules are constantly renegotiated by individuals and organizations, the agents acting in the field; at the same time, they restrict the scope of action and the possible behaviours of agents within a field. The usually tacit consensus concerning the rules of a specific field and the value of investment in it is, in Bourdieu‘s terms, a field-specific ‘illusio’, or social illusion. The illusio ensures that the agents in the field continue to fight for advantageous positions or certain resources within the social space.

Fordism refers to a phase in a capitalist economy that is primarily based on the production of value by industry. Important motors for growth in such an economy are the mass production and mass consumption of blue and white-collar workers who are secured by a social state. This economic model, influenced, for example, by the concepts developed by Henry Ford, the auto industrialist, in the 1920s, underwent a crisis in the 1970s, causing a transition to the post-Fordist phase.

A post-Fordist economy is driven by the financial market and relies primarily on knowledge-intensive information/communication technologies. It is characterized by a trend towards individualized and non-formalized working conditions that have the potential to turn all individuals into entrepreneurs of the self.

In the other languages of “Time for Cultural Mediation” we have adopted gender-conscious language. We have used the underline (e.g. Vermittler_innen [cultural mediator_ess]) to interrupt the flow of reading and oppose the binary, fixed on male and female gender order.

The underline creates a symbolic space, referred to as the “gender gap”. It is used to indicate variant gender-identities beyond the category man/woman. (This is in contrast to the conventional use of the term gender gap, for example, for financial discrimination against women in relation to men in comparable professional positions.) In the English version it was not possible to adopt this form, as in the English language, unlike in German, French and Italian, nouns do not always imply gender. Nevertheless we are aware that job-titles may sometimes bring to mind gender-identities.

A term from critical urban sociology describing a process, in which previously neglected or impoverished urban neighbourhoods are upgraded, that has characterized the neoliberal transformation of large urban cities in the context of global competition. Often associated with social conflicts, gentrification causes a change in the social structure of a neighbourhood and the displacement of non-privileged residents. Art and culture often function as the vanguard of gentrification processes; in some cases they are deliberately introduced to an area as part of a strategy to induce gentrification.

Globish, a portmanteau fusing global and English, refers to a utilitarian vocabulary (consisting of around 1,500 words) which is believed to function as a shared global communication code. Developed initially in transnational industrial management, but established in the sciences and the arts as well, this “decaffeinated English” (Robert McCrum) is controversial. Whether Globish is a language of domination or a democratic lingua franca furthering the cause of global understanding is the subject of debate.

This term describes the routine modes of thought, perception and representation with which individuals organize their actions in practice. Habitus embodies the – usually unconscious – norms acquired through socialization that link together collectives, such as occupational groups, generations or classes. In very subtle ways, habitus influences people’s gestures, language and postures. A habitus is not easy to transform or cast off. Pierre Bourdieu, in whose sociology the habitus concept plays an important role as class-specific behaviour, describes it as “history incarnate in the body”.

The term intervention art was coined in the 1980s to describe artistic works that intentionally attempt to induce change in their social environment. Artists taking this approach deliberately and systematically push their work outside the spaces assigned to art, seeking confrontation with the “outside”, with the local context, with political and social movements. Practices of intervention combine art and activism, thus inventing popular forms of the political, for instance the well-known disruptions of what still remains a male-dominated art business by the Guerrilla Girls or Volxtheaterkarawane’s theatrical interventions protesting against European border and asylum policy.

Knowledge is the key production force in a post-industrial society whose economy is based on information, communication and technology. Knowledge workers, who are employed primarily by what is called the tertiary sector or service sector of the economy, are required to remain innovative and informed, to respond flexibly to the global market and bring consistently up-to-date and expanding knowledge as a resource to it. Creativity is a core competence for productive knowledge workers.

Artistic work and practices possess – at least potentially – a high degree of interpretive latitude, i.e. they remain open to a process in which the viewer or visitor defines their meaning, which is, theoretically, never-ending. Viewed from a rational and social perspective on art, the meaning of art undergoes constant renewal caused by the activity of its recipients. This process of appropriation, retrieval or displacement holds an emancipation potential, which is of major significance for critical arts education.

The slightly pejorative term lay culture (one also finds the term amateur culture) refers to a diverse array of cultural practices which are also defined through their non-affiliation with high culture or the cultural sphere. Singing in choirs, amateur theatre or folk music are classic forms of lay culture. It is anchored in civil society structures and is frequently not institutionalized, self-funded or publically funded (usually from regional or local coffers, rarely from funds specifically allocated to culture). Associations and initiatives organized by volunteers are the main seats of lay culture, though adult schools, libraries, socio-cultural centres and art or music schools are sometimes also active in the sphere.

“The Love of Art” is the ironic title of a study on “European art museums and their public” by Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel published in 1966. The study aimed “not only at the deconstruction of the notion of a ‘love of art’ anchored in human nature, but also at exposing the true but disguised societal function of art, stabilizing and legitimizing social differences” (Aigner 2008).

The study was based on a wide-ranging sociological survey of many different European museums. One of its conclusions was that statistical probability suggests that one would have to wait 46 years in a museum before coming across someone who did not have more than a lower secondary school education. The book, which was not translated into German until 2006, unmasked the love of art as a “cultural need” generated by a person’s upbringing and a bourgeois ideology which avails itself a code which is deliberately decipherable only for people who possess certain means, or cultural capital (see Glossary entry on capital, forms of).

Majority society need not, as a literal reading might suggest, necessarily refer to a group in the quantitative majority; rather, at issue is a socially dominant and privileged group which embodies the social norms (for instance, white, Western, heterosexual, secularized, etc.) which determine who is considered a minority. Thus majority and minority describe a power relationship rather than a numerical relationship. Some scholars have proposed the use of the term ‘dominant culture’ as an alternative to underline the power aspect.

“Consequences of immigration and emigration, of commuter migration and transnational migration are constitutive for today’s societal reality. […] The degree to which migration affects societal reality is so decisive here that the expression migration society is an apt one. We are speaking of a migration society and not, for instance, of an immigration society, because the concept of migration is broader than that of immigration and it is this that makes the appropriate to a broader spectrum of migration phenomena.” (Broden, Mecheril 2007, p. 7)

Both the term and the concept date back to the reform pedagogical movement at the start of the 20th century. Taking a culturally critical perspective on the technocratic and rationalistic modern era and an instrumental approach to education, proponents of musisch education sought a holistically designed education of body and mind which encompassed music, art, language as well as sport and movement. The programme gradually worked its way into teaching curricula of schools. In the post-war period of the 1950s, musisch education won many supporters, who saw it as a conciliating and purportedly apolitical concept. Subsequently, musisch education drew criticism in critical education discourses as being biased towards cultural conservatism, and many disavowed it as a concept. Nonetheless it continues to resonate in certain current views on cultural education.

  We speak of naturalization when relationships or systems are depicted as natural although they are actually socially produced. These relationships or systems are then seen as givens and unalterable, since nature – unlike culture or history – is thought of in that way. The fact that nature and history are “confused at every turn” as Roland Barthes phrased in “Mythologies” (Barthes 2003/1972, p. 6/10), was revealed as a component of an ideology which sought to prevent changes in the status quo. Anti-racist, feminist or post-colonial positions are therefore continually addressing criticism at naturalizations.

Paternalism refers to a highly ambivalent strategy of supporting, caring or intervening “from above” – from a position of power and superiority – on behalf of subjects considered to be needy, challenging their autonomy “for their own good”. Classical configurations of paternalism, which is always “well meant”, are found in the relationship between parents and children, teachers and pupils, the affluent and the poor. Paternalistic gestures, often subtly disguised in the forms and rhetoric of empowerment, result in a consolidation of power relationships. A nuanced critique of paternalism should not overlook the dimension of protection and care it contains, which a liberal critique of the “welfare state” would like to see eliminated.

People of colour (also: person of colour) is a term used by some minoritized non-white people to describe themselves. It is connected to a strategy to create a political and strategic alliance against racism, in a context in which various groups have been played off against one another in the past. “The importance of a policy of allying various communities of colour is also evident in the fact that we have to take back the societal power of definition which has been denied us in the context of a generally white and majority-German dominated debate about racism, migration and integration.” (Dean 2011, p. 607)

Since the late 1980s, performativity has been a key concept in many disciplines, such as linguistics, sociology and cultural studies. Central to the theories of performativity is the idea that socio-symbolic structures (such as gender-based structures or social spaces) are not simply given, but rather represented and produced. The semiotic theories on the speech act and the performance of speech by its speaker provide the starting point for the concept of performativity. One challenging dimension of the concept is that the thinking about performativity does not see the “real” or “natural” behind that which is represented or produced. This, in a sense, is performativity’s provocative aspect, which emerges clearly, for example, in Judith Butler’s gender theory.

Post-dramatic theatre is theatre which has emancipated itself from drama, i.e. from producing a dramatic work, a literary text, a “play”. Instead, the focus is on the performance, the theatrical per se, which takes place in relation to the space, the acting and the audience. It does not centre around a text, but rather the theatre and its material situation. The term, coined by theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann, can be interpreted or appropri­ated in a variety of ways, with the result that even text-based theatre can be defined as post-dramatic (as long as the text is not a traditionally structured dramatic text).

Theorist Maria do Mar Castro Varela uses the concept of the power to do harm in her analysis of educational relationships: “The more privileged my position, the more power I have to do harm. Sometimes this causes people to have a sense of helplessness, because they feel that they are unable to satisfy anyone, that people are always correcting them.” To address this, she calls for self-reflection and self-criticism: “The act of educating is saturated with power and always entails the risk of injuring other people, to that extent, it appears necessary to develop forms of sensitivity, hone one’s own perception and take up a critical attitude to the system which endowed one with privileges.” (Castro Varela 2004)

Precarious employment conditions are conditions of unregulated employment with little (or no) social safeguards, i.e. as a contractor, rather than as a regular employee. Precarious employment situations are characterised by insecurity and, frequently, underpayment, but one must not forget that freedom and self-determination are also features of them. In certain sectors (art, media, cleaning, nursing) precarious employment conditions are the norm.

Precarization refers to the trend toward increased insecurity in working and living conditions. It is an effect of the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and society and of cognitive capitalism (see that entry). The rapid deregulation of employment and the replacement of permanent employment with short-term project work and temporary contract work are having enormous impacts on individuals and society, affecting primarily non-privileged individuals (e.g. labour migrants on construction sites or in nursing care) but also privileged workers (cultural workers or scholars). Precarious employment is also associated with aspects of self-determination and self-realization, which make the continuance of a (self-) exploitation possible but which also hold out resistance potential as suggested in the analysis of Isabell Lorey in her book “Die Regierung der Prekären” [“Government of the precarious”] (Lorey 2012).

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu attributed a relatively larger amount of autonomy to the art field (see the entry on field) that is associated with the fields of the economy and politics. The art field reverses the logics of the others: the lower the economic profit, the greater the symbolic capital. The autonomy of art is also a key assumption in aesthetics theory as well, in which that autonomy is seen as giving rise to the critical potential of art with respect to society and its structures. In view of the co-opting and exploitation of art, the relative autonomy of art is understood in very different ways from various different political and theoretical perspectives: as implicit, as lost or as something to be regained.

Representation inevitably contains an element of presentation. “Representation means putting forth meaning using a language, whereby language is understood to mean a system of signs, whose use is governed by codes. The process of representation is a social practice which is essential for the putting forth and circulation of meaning – through the use of the medium of language (general system of signs)” (→ Medienkulturwiki).

Every representation attempts to fix the various meanings of signs, images etc. and to assign priority to a certain meaning. This results in a “battle over representation” (Stuart Hall), which centres around key questions: what is shown and what is not shown? Who represents whom in what way, and who are not entitled to represent (themselves or others)?

A critical perspective on representation examines the powerful effects produced by an act of representation or presentation (for instance, in the documentation of cultural education work). By examining that which is shown or which is not shown, and how and by whom, one can create a space for criticism that reveals, first and foremost, how an alternative representation might appear. In this sense, a representation-critical perspective is a political perspective that addresses power relationships.

While routine racism is a term which refers to individual racist acts, whether deliberate on or not, of a type which people defined as minorities continually confront, structural racism refers to practices which come into play at a level above that of the individual. These are forms of racism which arise from societal systems and are expressed in their logics, economies, standards or laws. Discrimination in electoral systems, in the job market, in the legal system, and in the workplace are effects of structural racism. In the case of both routine and structural racism, what is at issue is “not simply the prejudices of individuals, but rather the legitimization of societal hierarchies which are based on discrimination against groups construed in this way. In this sense, racism is always a societal relationship.” (Rommelspacher 2006).

Self empowerment (a concept associated with the US American civil rights and women’s liberation movements) on the part of marginalized or minority groups or individuals, refers to a redistribution of the powers of representation, definition and agency, primarily through social, political and cultural participation. A critical examination of hidden aspects of paternalism (see that entry) is imperative, because self empowerment is also currently much lauded as a neoliberal management strategy, in a less than liberating spirit, the point of which is to delegate responsibility to what are actually disempowered individuals.

In light of the power of representation (see that entry) which privileged positions tend to acquire and make use of, self-representation by marginalized subjects can be seen as a counterstrategy: i.e. a key “policy in the first person plural” (→ Kien Nghi Ha). Self-representation gives under- and misrepresented individuals the opportunity and the means to present and represent their own positions while reining in the ambitions of the majority to speak for others.

Socio-cultural animation is a discipline and practice of social work which has its roots in a range of theories and traditions of critical pedagogy, though first and foremost in an engaged leisure-time education for children and youths (the term was first used in France in the 1950s and further in the social movements of the 1970s and 80s.)

Socio-cultural animation is fundamentally participation-oriented and attempts to encourage or engage individuals and groups to participate in the transformation of individual spheres of action such as social structures in their communities, i.e. to use culture as a way of intervening in the social arena.

Soft skills are less easily pinned down than “hard” specialist knowledge and skills, but they are in ever-greater demand in both the business world and society as a whole. They include communicative and social abilities, like the ability to empathize, to work in a team, loyalty, and personality traits like friendliness, self-assurance or ambition. Because they can be of value in important processes like networking, the post-industrial (employment) world is developing a new appreciation for soft skills, which have frequently been categorized as feminine and associated with the private sphere.

A term that currently comes up quite often in urban studies contexts, the Soho Effect refers to a process of gentrification triggered by artists and “Bohemians”, i.e. the displacement of socially and economically underprivileged residents in the process of upgrading an urban neighbourhood. The term is derived from New York’s Soho neighbourhood, which underwent a transformation in the 1980s. Initially, artists seeking affordable housing moved into the district, which made the district attractive to developers and urban planners: today, Soho is one of New York’s most expensive neighbourhoods. The intentional fostering of “creative clusters” in a given area has established itself as a strategy for urban renewal.

The post-colonial philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has advocated the tactic of “strategic essentialism”, meaning identifying oneself with an oppressed group for a strategic purpose and to speak about that group and for it, to represent it while fully aware of the snares associated with such representation. This would entail speaking, for strategic and political reasons, as a “Roma man” or as a “Muslim woman” and laying claim to an identity, knowing all the while that that claim is problematic. Strategic essentialism is characterized by the fact that it makes visible the pitfalls and problematic aspects of identity composition.

Assuming that resources other than economic capital (see entry on capital, forms of) are factors in the marketplace, then it must be possible to generate symbolic profit as well. If, for instance, a museum can promote an image of itself as a particularly advanced institution by hosting a critical cultural education project, then it can credit itself with having obtained a symbolic gain, which it can benefit from in various ways, including financially (perhaps through acquiring additional public or private funding earmarked for progressive museums, etc.).

A systematic concept of art – which is distinct from an ontological or an idealistic concept of art – encompasses everything that appears in the system of art, that which is made as art, labelled art or perceived as art, as well as that which is produced or critiqued in the context of art. Thus a wide range of phenomena and practices extending beyond the static concept of the work and its authors belong to the system of art. In this context, it is essential to bear in mind that access to this system is not random but, on the contrary, is governed by communities of definition, i.e. individuals and organizations which settle on what is eligible, or not, to be integrated with the system of art and when.

It has become strategically important and nearly compulsory for cultural institutions to be visitor-oriented or act as such. The motivations behind attempts on the part of institutions to think from their visitors’ points of view and respond to their needs can vary: notions of democratization may be the driving factor, but a service-provision model may also. In any case, it is now a management mantra in the cultural arena that visitor orientation leads to an increase in visitor numbers.

Visual literacy refers to an education or competency in the fundamentals of the field of the visual (Sigrid Schade, Silke Wenk), i.e. the ability to read visual images which, contrary to received wisdom, cannot be understood without some previous knowledge. Visual literacy enables the viewer to contextualize images, to perceive the representational relationships they entail (see entry on representation) and the processes of production and dissemination in which they are embedded. Promoting visual literacy among the public, therefore, can cause people to adopt a responsible and critical approach to that which is visual. The definition of this competency is something that should be the subject of reflection and constant renegotiation, as it is not an objective quality but rather a social construction which reflects power structures. (Self-)Critical cultural education subjects normative notions of visual literacy to scrutiny.

white as printed here, is a typographical convention proposed by scholars of → critical whiteness studies, which seeks to provoke an awareness of and to counter, in printed text, the powerful neutrality and normality of being white. In this form, white, consistently set in italics and lower case, refers to a privileged position within a society, “in which the access to resources, is facilitated or impeded, in part, on the basis of skin pigmentation and physiognomy – i.e. within a racialized system” (Dean 2011). Black, capitalized and not italicized, refers to a marginalized and “racialized” position. In both cases, the typographic tagging is intended to point to the construed nature of these powerful categories and deliberately disturb the natural flow of a text.