Can Cultural Policies Recognize Everyday Multiculturalism Without Twisting It? An Attempt to Respond Through the Hip-Hop Experiences of Some Associative Structures in French Speaking Belgium

Hip-hop culture is well known for offering multiple and diverse opportunities to ethnicized and racialized minorities to publicly express themselves about what they want to. Besides, inside some specific societal context qualified by some researchers as “everyday multiculturalism” (Harris, 2013), the practice of hip-hop arts and culture, among others, seems able to favor the creation of meeting places and new cultural and artistic practices crossing borders considered as ethnic, socio-economic, religious, etc. Therefore, these cultural and artistic practices can generate new identity construction dynamics and new social aggregation forms through various projects and actions which become relevant and coherent with what seems to be the social reality of some members of ethnicized and racialized minorities for instance (Martiniello, 2015). Thus, for the cultural policies facing everyday multiculturalism, one of the major issues concerns the question of how to meet, recognize and encourage such dynamics without controlling the messages and/or the form of the expressions; without “formatting” and twisting it. To interrogate this issue, we propose to analyze the uses of hip-hop culture as lifelong educational tool for citizenship through diverse socio-cultural projects and working groups implemented with state subsidies from law and public policies inside specific French speaking Belgian associative structures. Our qualitative analysis articulates various sources and methodological tools: archives, inventories, participants’ observations, interviews, analysis of artistic productions or public policy analysis. Diverse research works about hip-hop pedagogy (Hill and Petchauer, 2013), multiculturalism (Vertovec, 2007, Martiniello, 2014) and lifelong education mainly frame our theoretical approach. Bibliography