Dominant academic analyses and prevailing cultural policies are inclined towards identifying and alleviating exclusion at the consumer side of art practice. For example, art galleries provide educational and outreach programmes and government initiatives are geared towards promoting better access to and wider participation in culture. However, such approaches tend to neglect the supply side of art practice and so the economies of exclusion remain intact. Therefore it is necessary to confront the social mechanisms of conformity and exclusion that exacerbate inequalities and impoverish educational culture (Kenning. 2012) and professional cultural production.

This paper opens up a discursive framework to consider how art pedagogy can take on systemic organisational structures and institutional normalisation (Freire. 2006). Although art pedagogy makes claims to democratic inclusion it remains accessible only to very specific segments of society by favouring those attributes acquired through access to what are seen as valid and legitimate forms of cultural and social capital (Bourdieu. 1986). Despite the processes of expansion and massification of higher education since the 1960s there remains persistent patterns of under-representation within art pedagogy and consequently inequalities within the field of cultural labour persist.

In order to consider a clear strategy about how to put inclusion into effect this paper asks how an intersectional framework can be usefully applied (Case. 2016). Intersectionality denotes the ways in which structures of power and domination are interconnected and co-constitutive and is a mechanism to consider how both explicit and tacit exclusion is socially constructed. An intersectional analysis is employed to understand how historical and contemporary manifestations of identity, difference, and disadvantage continue to shape cultural production. This paper aims to shift the dominant approach that merely looks to include those who are excluded into the dominant framework towards a more transformative approach. It asks how to challenge existing inequalities within the mainstream system and encourage alternative pedagogical and organisational frameworks that contest the politics of access.