Laurel Sarah Butler, a 2023 graduate of the EdD in Educational and Professional Practice, just published her dissertation titled, Cultivating Abolitionist Praxis through Healing-Centered Engagement in Social Justice Youth Arts Programs.
Through critical-phenomenological interview-based research, Butler’s participants were young people who were in Social Justice Youth Arts programs during their teenage years. The participants engaged in a series of semi-structured interviews focused on recollecting their lived experiences in those programs and the years since.
These interviews examined the ways in which the principles of Healing-Centered Engagement were present within these young people’s experiences of those programs, as well as the extent to which those experiences may have encouraged or cultivated a lived praxis of the principles of the contemporary abolitionist movement. Butler’s research describes how these young people’s engagement with Social Justice Youth Arts Program encouraged their process of identity formation as artists and activists, and how the durability and evolution of those self-identifications manifested in their broader social and behavioral context over time.
Butler is an educator, facilitator, organizer, and artist based on Tongva land, known in settler-colonial terms as Los Angeles, CA. As an independent consultant, she works with nonprofits, museums, schools, universities, and organizations, integrating social justice principles into arts education program design and implementation. Butler has worked with clients such as the California Institute of the Arts Community Arts Partnership, the Getty Museum, ArtWorx LA, Inner City Arts, the Helen B. Landgarten Art Therapy Clinic, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, Arts 4 LA, the New Mexico Arts & Justice Network, the UT Austin Department of Theater, the Temple University Creative Scholars Program, the LMU First to Go Program, GROUND SERIES Dance Company, iLEAD Charter Schools, and numerous schools and school districts throughout the country.
She has served as Associate Director of UCLA’s Visual & Performing Arts Education program, Arts Education and Social Emotional Learning Specialist for the Los Angeles County Office of Education as well as numerous youth groups. Butler’s award-winning work as a performing artist has been presented across the country and internationally, and her writing has appeared in numerous publications.
Learn more about Butler and read her Cultivating Abolitionist Praxis through Healing-Centered Engagement in Social Justice Youth Arts Programs here.
