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Abstract
The arts are often seen as peripheral to the ‘real business’ of school and schooling. While this has been the case for some time now, the increasing pressures of high-stakes testing and ever-more draconian public funding schemes (particularly in the wake of 9/11) have created something of a ‘perfect storm’ for those working in the arts. Arts proponents today live and operate within a culture of scarcity, having to justify their increasingly marginalized vocations while competing for continually shrinking resources. The result is an often deep-bodied sense of vulnerability, one which saturates the social field (both micro and macro) of arts education in ways not often publicly acknowledged. In this article, I explore this notion of ‘vulnerability’ as a framework for understanding qualitative data which emerged from a three-year arts and education project I conducted in a large, northeast city in the USA beginning in 2003. In so doing, I look to open up a broader discussion about the oft-ignored intersection(s) between the material and aesthetic in arts and education – a discussion which is sober about the future of such work in times of economic scarcity and conservative retrenchment.
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)/New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) through an Empire State Partnership (ESP) awarded to these three organizations. As per academic conventions, I use pseudonyms for the organizations, schools, and particular places in this study. But this work could not have been completed without the input of the organizations involved in this ESP partnership. Among others, Radhika Rao provided outstanding feedback on an earlier version of this paper.
Notes
1. Central City News is available at LexisNexis.com.
