Introduction: The Biopolitics of Art Education

This issue of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies offers a timely opportunity for an extended discussion of current practices at the intersection of art education and disability studies, a discussion that has the potential to further practice and theory in both domains. Art education has an obvious role in the development of our understanding of culture and is, like all forms of education, shaped by explicit as well as implicit processes of cultural production. Literary and cultural disability studies have considerable potential for enabling us to understand the relationships among disability, culture, and society at a deep ideological level that impacts on art education at a curricular level and into arts practice. The articles in this special issue further the argument that art educators are particularly well placed to respond in creative and innovative ways to potentially restrictive normative practices and rigid assessment regimes at the heart of disabling school practices. Emerging in these articles are highly reflective insights from disabled and nondisabled art educators working in compulsory and post-compulsory sectors and who acknowledge disability as a creative resource.

It is useful to offer an initial definition if only to set some workable parameters for the articles that follow. Art education, for the purposes of this special issue, is the field of education that has emerged from visual art education. It is recognized internationally for its importance in the education of all children and young people. It is concerned with enabling children and students to respond to their experiences of the world through practice, principally by making artefacts. Although it draws on theoretical, contextual, and historical perspectives, it has a clear and distinctive place in the school curriculum since it prioritizes material forms of knowing and being. Following the work of Michel Foucault, we can also acknowledge that art education operates as (as well as within) a form of power that can objectivize and divide learners (and teachers) as particular types of creative subject (Foucault). The rendering of certain body/minds as able/disabled might appear irrelevant to some art educators whilst for others it may extend or constrain the possibilities for creative practice.

The Biopolitics of Art Education is a further stage in our efforts to engage with issues concerning access and equity in art education. In our role as editors of the International Journal of Art and Design Education (iJADE) we have been keen to acknowledge the centrality of disability in enabling us to celebrate and critique art education. This is most clearly illustrated by two recent conferences and the corresponding special issues hosted by iJADE and the National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD), entitled "Art for Life: Race, Gender, Disability and Class. Critical Discourses around Participation in Arts Education" (2014) and "Creating Spaces: Inclusivity, Ethics and Participation in Art and Design Education" (2019, forthcoming). As editors we have a shared commitment to equity and democratic pedagogies and a clear belief in the power that art education can exert on the lives of children and young people. In addition, we have a commitment to promoting critical discourse on contemporary practices as well as future directions for the development of art education.

It is worth noting that this special issue enables us to engage with debates at the intersection of art education and disability studies at a time when art educators in many places around the world face hostile environments and reduced resources as a result of governmental and economic policies (Jeffreys). This worsening in the conditions conducive to practical and creative education is also particularly detrimental to the lived experiences of disability, as witnessed in England where mental health in schools has deteriorated, according to the NSPCC, a trend which, perhaps more than coincidentally, corresponds with the decrease in arts subject time in the curriculum (Jeffreys). Art educators and scholars in disability studies have independently acknowledged the threats generated from global insecurity, environmental change, and austerity, and have nonetheless offered sites of resistance. Neoliberal capitalism domesticates and contains bodies, as Robert McRuer and Merri Lisa Johnson have argued, and art education has not escaped this corrosive...