This book draws upon important developments in contemporary philosophy and the social sciences, particularly semiotics, hermeneutics, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, which focus on the centrality of language, discourse and power in order to understand social processes. It applies such study to the professional field of art in education and in doing so develops new insights into how art practice is conceived in this field and how children, students and teachers acquire their particular identities. The distinctive and unique approach of the book is that it opens up art education to the broader field of social enquiry into practice, subjectivity and identity thereby situating art education within a shifting ideological and political space.