Abstract

Although exclusion has been taken up as a central concern in contemporary educational research and policy (Slee & Tait, 2022), some of its most pervasive mechanisms structured through the unseen logics of ableism remain unaddressed because they do not, and often cannot, register as exclusions (Campbell, 2019). Ableism operates through many of the inclusive policies, practices, and frameworks that form the mechanisms through which access is distributed and exclusion is understood in education (Smilges, 2023). These forms of exclusion remain largely unaddressed in educational research because of where and how they operate—at the level of the in/actual. Dominant methodological and conceptual approaches that attempt to give form to, locate, or address ableism impose a structure within which exclusion can only be thought of as, or made legible through, the experiences of an excluded or absented subject by privileging what can be seen, measured, documented, or rendered as data (Gale, 2023). This leaves the ableism that is always already operating—preceding and exceeding any individual arrival, structuring material conditions and conceptual horizons such that some subjectivities may never enter the realm of possibility—unaddressed and inaccessible to inquiry. By attending to ableism as a structural force configuring conditions of im/possibility within educational reality, this thesis offers a framework enabling anti-ableist art education to attend to the mechanisms that produce and conceal exclusion and recognize absence as both a site of operation and active production that is at work even (and sometimes especially) within the research and practice of inclusive education.