Over recent decades, interculturality has become a central reference framework in cultural policy, education, and mediation practices. It is often used as a given assumption — a natural way of thinking about relations between different cultural contexts.
Yet this apparent self-evidence deserves to be questioned.
In a context shaped by accelerated cultural circulation, fragmented media spaces, and the reconfiguration of symbolic relations, the issue is no longer only the relevance of the concept, but its capacity to adequately describe contemporary realities.
A stabilised framework
Interculturality has gradually been integrated into institutional and professional languages. It now forms a shared vocabulary across culture, education, and international cooperation.
This process of integration has also led to stabilisation: the more the term is used, the less its underlying assumptions are questioned.
In many cases, it operates as a taken-for-granted category that can obscure more complex dynamics, particularly those related to the production and circulation of cultural narratives in transnational spaces.
Practices beyond the framework
On the ground, cultural practices cannot always be fully captured by the concept of interculturality.
Artistic projects, independent initiatives, and mediation formats often reveal more hybrid, asymmetric, and context-specific forms of interaction.
These dynamics are shaped as much by circulation as by negotiation. They partially escape a logic that understands cultural exchange primarily as balanced reciprocity.
A concept facing structural asymmetries
A key tension lies in the concept’s ability to account for power relations.
Interculturality often implies an underlying assumption of reciprocity. Yet contemporary cultural systems remain structured by asymmetries in access to resources, visibility, and recognition.
Against this background, approaches focusing on cultural circulation, regimes of visibility, or mediation structures often appear more precise in describing these dynamics.
One concept among others
Interculturality does not disappear from practice or discourse. It remains relevant in many institutional contexts.
However, it is no longer sufficient on its own to account for the complexity of ongoing cultural transformations.
Contemporary developments require analytical approaches that connect several dimensions:
- circulation of content
- production of narratives
- conditions of visibility
- structures of power
A shift in perspective
Rather than being discarded, interculturality can be understood as one entry point among others in the analysis of cultural systems.
It no longer functions as a comprehensive explanatory framework, but as one element within a broader analytical configuration.
In this sense, it becomes a partial tool among others.
Conclusion
The question is therefore not whether interculturality is still relevant, but under which conditions it remains operative.
Its relevance increasingly depends on how it is articulated with other forms of analysis focused on circulation, visibility, narratives, and cultural structures.
It is in this articulation that a more precise understanding of contemporary cultural dynamics emerges.
