Ruth Potts

I am a researcher practitioner and the point of contact for the newly created RiNA practitioner community, and will be working to bring together practitioner members to discover how, and in what way we want to meet as a community of practice. In my own work, I am interested in the phenomenon of political agency, and how it can be better understood and cultivated in the course of everyday life. My work, in a range of different political settings from arts activism to work for mainstream NGOs, sets out to work with others to open up spaces where people can think critically together. In doing this I have become increasingly interested in the porosity of apparently rigid borders that can seem to exist both between people and in nature - and how these borders can be overcome by what I have described as practices of ‘radical intimacy’. Through my participation in the Research in Action Community as a Practitioner member, I want to further this interest to increase the efficacy of my work and to explore more creative ways of expressing what it is that I think this approach to political agency does, or might do, so that it might be taken up, and furthered, in a range of contexts.