This research investigates the formation of visual as discursive practice. Discourses that celebrate, denigrate and omit visual are examined with a particular focus on discourses of the child and technology in art education. This thesis applies poststructural methodologies of discourse analysis to disrupt traditional accounts of discipline configurations determined in histories of art education. With a particular focus on Michel Foucault???s methods of history, archaeology and genealogy, art education as discipline is mapped through an investigation of visual as concept and practice. This research contends that the emergence of current practices in visual culture, as configured within the constraints of art education amplifies the conditions of visual to define art education as a field. It examines the mobilisation of discourse, verified by discipline formations in art education, and the way in which such formations distribute and categorise knowledge that is sequenced within power structures. Therefore, visual, as a discursive practice is one way through which to trace the conditions of the field, including the structure of discipline as knowledge and subject in art education.

This qualitative study aimed to examine which discourses can be found within the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (BUP) and women’s shelters against domestic violence, concerning children that have experienced violence within the family, from two perspectives: the child’s need of father and of protection from violence. The study also aimed to examine which discourses can be found within the organisations concerning children’s well-being, how they define their mission concerning domestic violence and how this can affect the practical work with children that have experienced violence and their parents. The questions that the study aimed to answer were which discourses can be distinguished within BUP and the women’s shelters against domestic violence and how they can affect the different agencies’ view of the child’s need and well-being. These questions have been answered with collected interviews from the two respective agencies which have then been interpreted and processed through a critical discourse analysis from different theoretical concepts such as dominant discourses and service discourses in relation to Social Work, children’s need as a social construction and discourses of the child as a victim and an active participant. What the study showed was that the active participant-discourse overall was more prominent within BUP and that the victim-discourse was more prominent within the women’s shelters against domestic violence but also that both discourses were distinguishable in different ways and to different extents in both agencies in different combinations and variations. The study also found that the discourses, in different ways and to different extents, also affected the agencies’ view of the child’s need of father and of protection from violence.