The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art, Craft, and Visual Culture Education (2023) demonstrates how art, craft, and visual culture education activate social imagination and action that is equity and justice driven. Specifically, this book provides arts-engaged, intersectional understandings of decolonization in the contemporary art world that cross disciplinary lines. Its diverse group of authors address themes of histories, space and land, mind and body, and the digital realm.

In this presentation, we (the editors) draw on chapters from the 4 themes to present artistic and arts based problematizations and strategies that confront and address the divisive effects of nation and empire building on diverse communities. For example, the British used a policy of divide and rule to build their Empire in what is currently South Asia. That policy continues to be adapted to divide people on political and ideological lines in the name of nation-building. 

We present contributing authors' voices, representing various parts of the world, to engage discussion on and engagement with how arts educators are experiencing these fault lines and their consequential divides, and how arts educators might continue to recognize and address these in our work. We hope that audiences in this session become participants in mapping these occurrences and resistances in their spheres of experience with a view to expand our collective understanding of the need for and possibilities of decolonization holistically in a way that calls for a focus on solidarity rather than difference.