Disability Studies in Art Education (DSAE) Column: Spring 2023

NAEA DSAE Interest Group Collaboration With the International Disability Studies, Arts and Education (iDSAE), September 30, 2023

Column by: Mira Kallio-Tavin and Alice Wexler

The International Disability Studies, Arts and Education (iDSAE) community has organized biennial conferences since 2017. After two successful and intense in-person conferences, the global pandemic changed our plans for the 2021 conference. Like NAEA’s 2021 National Convention, the iDSAE conference was organized fully online. The first international conference was held in Helsinki in 2017, organized by Aalto University; the second was held in Philadelphia in 2019, organized by Moore College of Art & Design. While there are plans for the next in-person (and hybrid) conference to be organized by the University of Nebraska Omaha in 2024, this year iDSAE will host a Virtual Forum of critical disability studies dialogues on timely issues with artists, activists, and educators. This Forum will take place on September 30, 2023. Tickets will be available through registration, announced on the recently updated iDSAE web pages: http://www.idsae.net. The Virtual Forum invites the international and national art education disability studies communities to engage in future dialogues between biennial conferences.

The years between the international conference since 2018 have also been marked for a journal publication based on the call announced during the conferences. These special issues have been published in the Research in Arts and Education journal (https://journal.fi/rae). The latest issue was published December 31, 2022, with the conference theme Disability Justice: Decentering Colonial Knowledge, Centering Decolonial Epistemologies, edited by Alexandra Allen, Claire Penketh, and Alice Wexler. In this issue, the authors and editors recognize how

the pandemic had fore-fronted social justice in disability studies, art education, and society: the inequity of economic resources, the exploitation of the most vulnerable people, systemic racism, and the disproportionate effects of climate change on non-industrial countries. The intersection of racial, able-bodied, ethnic, sexual, cultural, gendered, environmental, and economic power disparities are interlocking oppressions that cannot be detached from colonial history. Decolonial work is foregrounded in the lived realities of marginalized people who diverge from neurotypical and dominant systems. (p. 2)

Thematically, the discussion on global and contemporary world issues of disability justice will continue with the Virtual Forum this year.

Inviting Questions Toward the 2023 Virtual Forum

The Forum will be organized around panel discussions that will focus on themes, such as disabled artist–teacher identity, disability studies and arts education in a post-COVID era, disability and climate issues, and debility–disability: the global effects of oppression and precarity. The call for this Forum will focus on inviting participants to ask questions, raise concerns, and suggest topics for conversation. Participants will be invited to change virtual rooms, offer their contribution, and/or listen to the ongoing conversations.

The new web pages (http://www.idsae.net) offer the updated information about the upcoming Forum, an invitation to submit questions for the Forum, information about the previous conferences, and links to the open-access Research in Arts and Education journal issues.

To assure that the International Disability studies, Arts and Education (iDSAE) network would be better distinguished from the NAEA’s Disability Studies in Art Education (DSAE) Interest Group, we now have a new logo for iDSAE. We realize that many members are active in both groups and do not separate their work and activism in these two groups. Yet for the sake of clarity, we mark this year as a new era with a new official acronym—iDSAE—with the new web pages and revised logo. Please, see the logos of both groups below, and feel free to join both groups!

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Reference

Allen, A., Penketh, C., & Wexler A. (2022). Disability justice: Decentering colonial knowledge, centering decolonial epistemologies [Editorial]. Research in Arts and Education, 2022(3), 2–4.

Alice Wexler, DSAE Columnist
Professor Emerita, SUNY New Paltz.

J. T. Eisenhauer Richardson, DSAE Chair
Associate Professor, Arts Administration Education and Policy, The Ohio State University. Email: richardson.865@osu.edu