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O’Toole Fintan (2006). Dismantling the Barriers to Participation in Cultural Life. National
Disability Authority. 5th National Research Conference. Dublin 16th November 2006.
Accessed at:
http://www.nda.ie/CntMgmtNew.nsf/dcc524b4546adb3080256c700071b049/5A19C972AF5A7B93
802571E60052A06B/$File/3_fintan_otoole.htm
This paper is an argumentation on the importance of seeing cultural participation as something
broader than just attending a play in a theatre. Culture is considered as part of what it means to be
human and therefore exclusion from it translates into exclusion from participation in human, social
land civic life. As the author says: “If you do not have the capacity to participate in cultural life, you
are ipso facto being defined socially as outside the social community”.
The second part of this paper explores the issue of the barriers to cultural participation and the
importance of trying to break these down in order to guarantee the cultural, and therefore civic,
rights of a considerable proportion of the population.
The paper opens with an attempt to define culture in order to explain what can be considered as
cultural participation. Given that ‘culture’ can refer to everything that is not natural it can be said
that Culture is critically and fundamentally about the way in which we interact with everything that
is not ourselves. It therefore includes all of those things which we can categorise as human
achievements.
The second basic assumption for this paper is that culture is a field in which there is continuity
between what we think of in the narrow definitions of culture and many other critical human
creations on the other, including politics, the notion of human rights, and our history and progress
as a species. Cultural participation is therefore considered as something strongly attached to our
humanity and to our rights as humans.
For the author, if culture includes all of the creations of humanity, if it includes this continuity of the
process of human exploration and development, then exclusion from culture is about exclusion
from full participation in what it means to be truly human.
The author refers to the report from the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States on
the relationship between people’s participation in the arts on the one side and people’s
participation in public life on the other as an evidence of a strong correlation between participation
in artistic activity and participation in social and political communities. So if cultural participation is
related to civic participation that means that being incapable of participating in cultural life is like
being implicitly defined as a non-citizen.
In this context the author tries to address the question of barriers to cultural participation. The
barriers to cultural participation includes three main categories: physical exclusion, cultural
exclusion in terms of culturally created images (our present culture continues to produce imagery
which is extremely hostile to people with disabilities), and the broader issue of social exclusion
which certainly includes people with disabilities but is not confined to them.
For the author there is an interesting dialogue to be had with the disability movement on the one
side, and those who are more broadly concerned with cultural participation on the other because
there is a very strong link between the exclusion of people with disabilities from cultural
participation and the broader sense of social and cultural exclusion.
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