Dr Alan Cusack is Lecturer in Community Education. His research transverses the role of artist, teacher, and researcher within pedagogical frameworks towards a mode of community co-production. He uses archival and narrative inquiry to examine the potential of individual and shared experience as a space for facilitating productive conflict. He has worked in secondary education and across various community settings for nearly twenty years and is particularly interested in how issues of culture and identity are approached in sites of learning. His recent arts-based research has examined the impact of arts-in-nature on young people’s wellbeing, youth voice in urban spaces and the pedagogical potential of co-constructed archives. As an artist, he has delivered various community inclusion projects for European Peace III Fund across the UK and Ireland.

Alan has a PhD and an MA from University College London, PGCE in Art from Exeter University, and BA(Hons) Fine Art from Falmouth College of Art. He joined University of the West of Scotland from University College London in 2023, where he was Lecturer in Art and Education.

He is currently working on a project exploring community archives and socially engaged curating in Glasgow.