Abstract
This autoethnographic dissertation argues that the absence of art education from Pakistan’s formal education policies is not an oversight but a durable governance architecture rooted in colonial epistemology and reproduced through curriculum, examinations, and teacher credentialing. Since 1947, art education is positioned as cultural symbolism rather than stateaccountable knowledge—rarely mandated, examined, or resourced at scale. Integrating analytic autoethnography with interpretive policy analysis and a bounded South Asian regional comparison, the study introduces Disciplined Liminal Otherhood (DLO), a framework for analyzing how colonial institutional design, postcolonial policy absence, neoliberal market logics, and digital platform dependencies converge to produce learners who are credentialed within Western frameworks yet epistemically displaced from indigenous knowledge systems. Analysis of Punjab’s federal-to-provincial policy pipeline identifies a three-stage curricular mechanism—compulsory installation, elective containment, and bureaucratic erasure—rendering art education structurally invisible in curriculum, examinations, and teacher preparation. Pakistan’s 2024 National Education Policy Draft Framework devotes eighty-seven pages to educational reform without mentioning art education once. The dissertation proposes a graduated decolonial intervention model, arguing that decolonization requires epistemological transformation rather than institutional reform alone.