Fiona Whelan
Dr. Fiona Whelan is a Dublin based artist, writer and lecturer at NCAD. Her arts
practice is committed to exploring, exposing and reconfiguring power relations
through durational engagements with people and place. Since 2004, Fiona has worked in collaboration with Rialto Youth Project on long-term projects exploring equality issues related to class, gender and policing, co-producing multiple public works including Natural History of Hope (with Brokentalkers, Project Arts Centre, 2016), Policing Dialogues (The LAB, 2010) and The Day in Question (IMMA, 2009), much of which is documented in her critical memoir TEN: Territory, Encounter & Negotiation (2014). In 2016, in collaboration with sociologist Kevin Ryan, Fiona established the collaborative writing platform Two Fuse, committed to writing across disciplinary enclosures, the pair co-writing Freedom? (Cork University Press, 2018) and Beating the Bounds of Socially Engaged Art (Field Journal, 2016). As an educator, Fiona is committed to the professional development of artists with participatory and collaborative practices, teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level at NCAD. In 2015, she co-developed the TransActions publication series – dialogues in
transdisciplinary practice, as a collaboration between NCAD and Stockyard Institute in Chicago. In 2019, Fiona received her PhD from the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research at TU Dublin for her thesis 'Reconfiguring Systemic Power Relations: A Collaborative Practice-Based Exploration of Inequality with Young People and Adults in Dublin'.
Address: NCAD, 100 Thomas St., Dublin 8, Ireland
practice is committed to exploring, exposing and reconfiguring power relations
through durational engagements with people and place. Since 2004, Fiona has worked in collaboration with Rialto Youth Project on long-term projects exploring equality issues related to class, gender and policing, co-producing multiple public works including Natural History of Hope (with Brokentalkers, Project Arts Centre, 2016), Policing Dialogues (The LAB, 2010) and The Day in Question (IMMA, 2009), much of which is documented in her critical memoir TEN: Territory, Encounter & Negotiation (2014). In 2016, in collaboration with sociologist Kevin Ryan, Fiona established the collaborative writing platform Two Fuse, committed to writing across disciplinary enclosures, the pair co-writing Freedom? (Cork University Press, 2018) and Beating the Bounds of Socially Engaged Art (Field Journal, 2016). As an educator, Fiona is committed to the professional development of artists with participatory and collaborative practices, teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level at NCAD. In 2015, she co-developed the TransActions publication series – dialogues in
transdisciplinary practice, as a collaboration between NCAD and Stockyard Institute in Chicago. In 2019, Fiona received her PhD from the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research at TU Dublin for her thesis 'Reconfiguring Systemic Power Relations: A Collaborative Practice-Based Exploration of Inequality with Young People and Adults in Dublin'.
Address: NCAD, 100 Thomas St., Dublin 8, Ireland
less
Related Authors
Interests
Uploads
Papers by Fiona Whelan
analytical lens to examine a decade-long collaboration (2007-16) between its
author/artist and a Dublin-based youth organisation, Rialto Youth Project. In opposition
to the depoliticisation of inequality and associated insidious ethics of social inclusion, a
collaborative methodological framework is foregrounded, producing dialogical encounters in which multiple power relations are visualised, challenged and
reconfigured and where freedom is recognised as a lived contingent practice. Working
across disciplines and in response to lived experiences of systemic inequalities, a series
of transgenerational projects were developed to critically examine and respond to power
relations at a personal, community and societal level, contributing new transdisciplinary
knowledge across the fields of socially engaged art practice, youth work and education.
The thesis comprises an introduction, two chapters and a conclusion. By considering the
historical ontology of the practice and the formation of subject positions of those
working in collaboration, chapter one outlines the construction and conceptualisation of
power over time among a diverse group exercising political imagination. In articulating
lived experiences of complex and interconnected systemic power relations, the second
chapter examines the complex relationship of voice and listening in the public
manifestations of the collaborative practice, in which truth speaks to power and politics
is staged publicly through dialogical and transformative actions.
Books by Fiona Whelan
tracks the collaborative decision making process coupled with the artist's own thought process at each juncture of the work, to retrospectively identify the methodology inherent in the practice.
analytical lens to examine a decade-long collaboration (2007-16) between its
author/artist and a Dublin-based youth organisation, Rialto Youth Project. In opposition
to the depoliticisation of inequality and associated insidious ethics of social inclusion, a
collaborative methodological framework is foregrounded, producing dialogical encounters in which multiple power relations are visualised, challenged and
reconfigured and where freedom is recognised as a lived contingent practice. Working
across disciplines and in response to lived experiences of systemic inequalities, a series
of transgenerational projects were developed to critically examine and respond to power
relations at a personal, community and societal level, contributing new transdisciplinary
knowledge across the fields of socially engaged art practice, youth work and education.
The thesis comprises an introduction, two chapters and a conclusion. By considering the
historical ontology of the practice and the formation of subject positions of those
working in collaboration, chapter one outlines the construction and conceptualisation of
power over time among a diverse group exercising political imagination. In articulating
lived experiences of complex and interconnected systemic power relations, the second
chapter examines the complex relationship of voice and listening in the public
manifestations of the collaborative practice, in which truth speaks to power and politics
is staged publicly through dialogical and transformative actions.
tracks the collaborative decision making process coupled with the artist's own thought process at each juncture of the work, to retrospectively identify the methodology inherent in the practice.