7 Cultural Mediations
For many years, cultural mediation has already been a well-established research topic in Information and Communication Sciences: it enables the production of knowledge and gives rise to journal articles and symposia. Bernadette Dufrêne and Michèle Gellereau, who are both fully involved in cultural mediation, define along these lines the stakes in terms of teaching and research:
“More global field studies and theoretical ideas concern spaces, mediation dispositives and practices, their organization, their appeal, actors, and the public’s behaviors. Yet, just as a type of research whose goals are intellectual – to understand the function of the cultural sphere and the reasons why it is growing – and social – to carry out applied research – is being developed, we are conceiving the myth of a cultural mediation that should simultaneously solve the problems concerning the dissemination of culture and the social gap. This results in the necessity to distinguish between complementary discourses and critical discourses” (Dufrêne and Gellereau 2004, p. 204).
Researchers have been increasingly more interested in the issue related to the role of the public and cultural democratization since the emergence of the sociological research that shows the gap between audience and art, carried out by Bourdieu, among others (Bourdieu and Darbel 1996).
In the academic knowledge field, cultural mediation must explain and translate the knowledge of experts (which a lay audience ...