Folk Media and Decolonizing Art Education

Folk Media and Decolonizing Art Education advances a critique of conventional multicultural art education by centering folk media as a site of epistemic resistance and pedagogical transformation. The book argues that multicultural frameworks often reproduce liberal inclusion without dismantling colonial hierarchies and develops an intersectional, decolonial methodology attentive to race, caste, class, gender, indigeneity, and geopolitics.

This book provides readers with actionable strategies to redesign art education curricula, assessments, and institutional frameworks in ways that are ethically accountable and socially transformative. Methodologically, it draws on the internationally acclaimed Interfaith Childhoods research project which combines ethnographic research, curriculum analysis, and close readings of community-based artistic practices across diverse contexts in diasporic settings. Through analysis of contemporary folk performance traditions, digital community movements, and grassroots media collectives, the chapters demonstrate how vernacular cultural forms challenge Eurocentric art canons and institutional power.

Spanning late postcolonial policies to contemporary digital platforms, the book maps the evolving political life of folk media in everyday life and public culture. It offers practical strategies for educators seeking to redesign curricula, assessment, and institutional frameworks in ethically accountable ways. It will be essential reading for undergraduates and postgraduates in art education, cultural studies, and education, as well as scholars, teacher-educators, librarians, and non-specialist readers interested in decolonization, pedagogy, and socially engaged art practice.

Anna Hickey-Moody is Professor of Intersectional Humanities and Director of the Arts and Humanities Institute at Maynooth University, Ireland. Her research interests include disability, masculinity, gender, youth studies, religion, intersectionality and her publications include New Materialist Affirmations (2025, edited with Suvi Pihkala, Gretchen Coombs and Marissa Willcox), Faith Stories (2023) and Childhood, Citizenship and the Anthropocene (2021, with Linda Knight, Eloise Florence).

Christine Horn is Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow in the Centre for Functional Ecology at the Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal.

Divya Garg is a Research Fellow in the Digital Disability, Mental Health, and Social Inclusion research program at Curtin University, Australia. Her monograph Decolonizing Media Fandom (2025) explores global fan cultures and minority experiences of disability.