Art Education and Disability Futurity: Subjects on the Edge
Dr. Claire Penketh, Liverpool Hope University
Date: Wednesday, March 27, 2019 Time: 9:00–10.30am
Place: 617 Southam Hall, Carleton University (live videoconference with Liverpool Hope University, UK.)
This seminar brings recent research in art education and disability to consider how a future art education might be more fully informed by disability. The work emerges from a genealogy of art education and disability that traces histories of art education alongside contemporaneous discourses in disability from the nineteenth century to the present. For example, John Dewey and John Ruskin emphasised the role of observation as ‘the’ way of knowing and understanding the natural world. The transference of these ideas into technical craft and design education secured an ocularnormative approach to art education. Later, developments in child psychology and special education signalled a relationship between art education and therapy. An interest in Child Art, Outsider Art, and expressivism occurred with a rise in therapeutic approaches, with art educators implicated in the employment of creativity to overcome disability. More recently art education has emerged as critical social practice associated with contemporary art, identity work, and disability studies. Disability Futurity enables us to learn from these histories and imagine an art education that benefits from non-normative ways of knowing.
Claire Penketh is Head of the Department of Disability and Education, Associate Professor, and a core member of the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University. She is author of A Clumsy Encounter: Dyspraxia and Drawing (Sense, 2011) and co-editor of Disability, Avoidance, and the Academy: Challenging Resistance (Routledge, 2015).
This seminar is part of the Disability Futurity series organised by the CCDS in collaboration with Carleton University’s Disability Research Group. The seminar presentation in Liverpool will be connected live by videoconference.
For information about Disability Futurity, please contact Professor David Bolt, boltd@hope.ac.uk.
For information about the Carleton University event, please contact Dr. Ryan Patterson, Ryan.Patterson@carleton.ca