Valuation in Action: Cultural Participation and Repertoires of Justification in Suboptimal Situations

How do cultural participants legitimate engagement in situations where cultural participation is experienced as substandard? Drawing on pragmatist approaches to valuation, this article conceptualises justification as valuation-in-action. It maps the situated axiological work through which actors render suboptimal participation worthwhile despite experiential disincentives. Specifically, this study examines divergent sites of cultural participation: a museum makerspace in Belfast and a variety of London-based choirs, all of which were compelled to migrate online to comply with pandemic lockdown restrictions. This digitally mediated participation was experienced as inferior to co-present practice, but participants nonetheless engaged. Using inductive analysis based on interviews and focus groups, we identify six shared value repertoires mobilised to legitimate digitally mediated participation: Emotional Regulation, Socialisation, Identity, Time, Capabilities, and Indexical Continuity. These repertoires organise participants’ value talk legitimising online participation based on socio-emotional coping, connection/communitas, temporal anchoring, identity continuity, skill maintenance/development, and indexical links to the felt qualities and sociality of pre-pandemic co-presence. These findings provide scholars and policymakers with a pragmatic language for diagnosing what audiences treat as valuable in digital and hybrid cultural provision, enabling the creation of evaluation infrastructures that reflect participants’ value criteria rather than relying on access metrics or assumed hierarchies of cultural value.