Art Education When the World Is on Fire

Abstract

This article is a revised version of the Studies in Art Education invited lecture that was to have taken place at the annual convention of the National Art Education Association in March 2020. Taking into account the challenges of the global pandemic and the possibilities presented by uprisings for racial, climate, and social justice across the world, it is a call to action to art educators. Contributions of art education scholars connected to racial justice and environmental action are recognized as a shared inheritance from which one can draw to carry on such work. Notions of inheritance, interbeing, and irresistibility are analyzed as they connect to art’s unique and distinctive contributions to activist work. Drawing from scholarship and thinking both within and outside of the field of art education, I make a case in this article for action in the face of the possible end of the world as we know it.