Two Fuse
(2016-2022)

At once an ethos and a method of inquiry, Two Fuse is a collaborative platform that began in 2016, bringing together Kevin Ryan (who works in the discipline of sociology) and Fiona Whelan (who works in the field of socially-engaged/collaborative art), 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:

Writing:

Boys in the Making: an arts and education programme in conversation with ‘the biology of adversity and resilience’ (2022)

Anchored in a ‘core story’ of childhood development, ‘the biology of adversity and resilience’ (TBOAR) is an emerging scientific paradigm that seeks to explain how and why adverse childhood experiences have consequences in the form of negative ‘outcomes’ that span health and behavioural problems. In this article, Two Fuse bring TBOAR into conversation with an alternative way of producing knowledge about childhood adversity: an arts and education programme called Boys in the Making, which sees groups of boys and young men come together to collectively explore how a boy is shaped by and influences the world he lives in.

Read the text here.

Freedom? (2018)

Freedom? is a publication that examines the ways in which freedom in contemporary Ireland has become a race without a finishing line, while also exploring possibilities to reimagine the practice of freedom. Freedom? was launched in May 2018 as part of the series Síreacht – Longings for another Ireland, Cork University Press, 2018. Freedom? is available for purchase here.

Beating the Bounds of Socially-Engaged Art? A Transdisciplinary Dialogue on a Collaborative Art Project with Youth in Dublin, Ireland (2016)

Since 2004, artist Fiona Whelan has built a socially-engaged practice in the Rialto area of Dublin City, working with stories as a way of exploring conflictual and collaborative power relations and challenging inequalities. Kevin Ryan is a sociologist, and his approach to the study of power is primarily historical. Beating the Bounds of Socially-Engaged Art? was our first collaboration, a dialogue aimed at ‘unfolding’ the field of socially engaged art by discussing some of the ways that Fiona’s practice – which is both dialogical and durational – is also in critical dialogue with its own history and conditions of existence. Making such dialogue a more conscious feature of socially-engaged art intends to transfigure the field, bearing in mind that this requires an engagement with forms of power that have become deeply sedimented. In dialogue, Fiona wrote primarily from practice while Kevin focused on social theory to frame what we described as ‘legacy issues’. More specifically, Fiona and Kevin discussed some of the ways in which the field of socially engaged art in Ireland has been formed at the intersection of the micro-political (community arts) and the macro-political (neo-liberalism); how power is refracted through the distribution and division of places and parts ie. artist/non-artist, signature practice/participatory practice, paid work/voluntary participation; how the community arts sector may have been inadvertently complicit in depoliticising inequality by adopting the language of ‘disadvantage’ and procedures of project evaluation which have since solidified as the ‘new managerialism’; and finally the relationship between theory and practice – in particular the possible shortcoming of theory that takes on a legislative function rather than entering into a reciprocal relationship with practice, so that ideas and concepts become raw material to be formed through praxis. Read full text here (Field Journal, Issue 4, Spring 2016).

Presentations:

“Rip the Script”: Performing/Witnessing Natural History of Hope
Two Fuse (Fiona Whelan, NCAD & Kevin Ryan, NUI Galway)

The Sexual Politics of Freedom Conference. Hosted by The Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, The National University of Ireland – Galway. 17-18th Sep 2020

Power and (im)possibility? Socially-engaged art and Cynic practice
Two Fuse (Kevin Ryan, NUI Galway & Fiona Whelan, NCAD)

Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE):  Critical Theory and Radical Politics Workshop, University of Brighton. 29 May 2018.

Power and Freedom in the Enterprise Society: “catch up, keep up, get ahead…”
Two Fuse (Fiona Whelan, NCAD & Kevin Ryan, NUI Galway)

The Power of Narrative – IPSA RC 36 (Political Power) Interim Conference, hosted by the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia, Italy. May 30-31 2017