Bridging Clinical Art Therapy and Social Justice-Oriented Art-Based Communities

It shows how art-based communities within art therapy praxis can serve as healing and emancipatory spaces that bridge clinical and community contexts for individuals with intellectual disabilities. It demonstrates how these practices foster relational forms of social justice that go beyond formal rights and procedural inclusion, revealing how recognition, meaning, and radical belonging are co-created through art-based, embodied, community-based encounters.

Attuned to rights-based aspirations, relational ethics, and critical reflections on normativity that intersect in practice, art therapy can support processes of healing, social repair, and emancipation, cultivating community spaces and relationships where these processes can emerge, take root and flourish.