At once an ethos and a method of inquiry, Two Fuse is a collaborative platform that brings Kevin Ryan (who works in the discipline of sociology) and Fiona Whelan (who works in the field of socially-engaged/collaborative art) together through a commitment to thinking across the boundaries of disciplinary enclosures. Two Fuse is also a way of acknowledging the collaborative nature of inquiry – that the pursuit of knowledge and understanding entails both direct and indirect encounters and exchanges. To date Kevin and Fiona have collaborated on three texts, published in 2022, 2018 and 2016, and a number of presentations.
Fiona Whelan is an artist, writer and lecturer at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD). Her arts practice is committed to exploring and responding to systemic power relations and inequalities through long-term cross-sectoral collaborations with diverse individuals, groups and organisations. Since 2004, this practice has been rooted in Dublin south city, developing a series of collaborative, transgenerational projects, critically examining and responding to lived experiences of complex and interconnected systemic power relations (including class, gender, housing, policing). These durational and multi-faceted processes typically manifest as visual, performative or dialogical encounters in which multiple power relations are exposed and interrogated. Fiona’s writing focuses on the complex relationality, labour and ethical challenges of her collaborative methodology, which emerges at the intersection of socially engaged arts practice, youth work and education. At NCAD, she is committed to the professional development of practitioners with socially engaged and collaborative practices, through the development and delivery of undergraduate and postgraduate provision. www.fionawhelan.com
Kevin Ryan is lecturer at the School of Political Science & Sociology, National University of Ireland, Galway and a graduate of the Crawford College of Art & Design in Cork. His research focuses on degrees of freedom, i.e. not freedom as an abstract figure of thought or normative ideal, but rather freedom as an agonistic arena of practice which is conditioned and constrained by historically-constituted relations of power. Kevin is the author of Social Exclusion and the Politics of Order (2007), and co-editor (with Mark Haugaard) of Political Power: The Development of the Field (2012). His articles have been published in Childhood, Critical Horizons, Critical Sociology, the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, The Journal of Political Power, and Thesis Eleven. https://nuigalway.academia.edu/KevinRyan