Discrimination and Cultural Policy: Between Cultural Rights and Cultural Capital

Discrimination is often viewed as an individual attitude or a social issue, effectively addressed through the application of rights-based codes of conduct or a legal framework of rights implementation. Its ‘cultural’ dimension has often remained insignificant, secondary or just underexplored. This article proposes that discrimination should also be understood as a cultural phenomenon, a response to which should involve cultural policy. Such policy, it is argued, could enhance certain rights that, in turn, could become axiomatic for a fuller legal comprehension of discrimination. Iteratively, this could then form the basis for further policy-based responses. A secondary register of this article takes the form of a proposal that rights-based cultural policies, to be effective, require an attention to cultural capital. By interconnecting the (contested) concepts of cultural rights, discrimination, and cultural capital, we will propose how cultural rights-based policy can serve as a more strategic response to discrimination, advancing the current impasse in our policy understanding of the phenomenon. Drawing on the legal foundations of cultural rights as a dimension of human rights law, this study both challenges Pierre Bourdieu’s conventional view of cultural capital and use it in a way that provides opportunity for the integration and coordination of human rights, anti-discrimination and cultural policies, strategically enhancing all these areas. The article’s conceptual approach will hopefully also provoke a new theoretical and practical impetus to research rights-based cultural policy itself, which might facilitate a comprehensive response to discrimination beyond the current legal measures that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.