Cultural consumption on the margins

A core tenet of Norwegian cultural policy is that culture is a good for both individuals and society.
For the individual, cultural engagement is seen as a source of insight, identity formation, joy, and a sense of belonging—in simpler terms: good and meaningful lives. For society, citizens’ engagement with culture is expected to contribute to shared frameworks of understanding, civically integrated communities, and social equality. These are benefits that cultural policy seeks to realize through an active and extensive set of policy instruments.

At the same time, we know that parts of the Norwegian population never or very rarely engage with publicly initiated cultural offerings – those we in this project refer to as non-users. Cultural statistics show that non-use correlates with various social differences. For the non-users themselves, this may entail a loss of access to meaningful cultural activity, but also a lack of recognition for their actual cultural preferences and ways of life. For cultural policy—whose mandate is to enable good and meaningful lives for all citizens through cultural offerings—non-users represent a critical blind spot. The consequence is that the policy instruments may lack precision, or even reinforce the very social inequalities they are designed to reduce.

At present, we know very little about non-users. This lack of knowledge can partly be explained by methodological challenges related to data collection outside urban and relatively privileged population segments, and partly by elitist operationalizations of concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘use’, and ‘participation’ in cultural research. The focus of cultural statistics on the use of specific cultural offerings, rather than people’s overall cultural engagement, may also contribute to the impression that non-users are more common than they actually are. As a result, we currently lack a sufficient knowledge base for designing a cultural policy capable of realizing its own ideals.

The project explores non-users through four complementary work packages:

1. The first provides a broad statistical mapping of arts and cultural engagement in Norway, focusing on who the non-users are and their lifestyles.
2. The second investigates non-use among children and youth through panel studies, examining how and why some young people remain outside the public cultural sphere.
3. The third focuses on selected culturally marginalized groups. Through an extensive interview design, it explores their relationship to the established cultural sector and how various forms of culture are part of their lifeworlds.
4. The fourth and final work package synthesizes insights from the previous three and discusses their implications for cultural policy.

The aim of the project is thus to produce a broad and robust empirical knowledge base on non-users, directed toward shaping the cultural policy of the future.