Abstract

Universal Design, initially an approach to designing barrier-free architectural spaces for disabled people, has primarily been adapted to schooling through the Universal Design for Learning framework. Contemporary abolitionism is a visionary grassroots movement to make prisons and jails obsolete, which has been brought into education discourse primarily through considering urban public schools as institutions of policing and punishment. By considering these strategies for reforming and ending confinement, respectively, this essay argues for a more expansive understanding of access in education. The argument for their compatibility in arts education is articulated first through reviewing shared aspects of these two approaches, then surveying examples drawn from artists’ practices, and lastly through a pedagogical approach framing the school as a complex and contradictory setting for making art.

Keywords: abolitionism, school-to-prison pipeline, Universal Design, Universal Design for Learning, disability aesthetics, carceral aesthetics, relational aesthetics, anti-racist art education

How to Cite:

Stabler, A., (2023) “Art Evading Confinement: Abolition as Universal Design”, Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education 40(1), 32-55. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jcrae.5469