This exchange of letters between Ruth and Patricia is currently submitted to the Schumacher Magazine for the Autumn 2025 print edition. Please do not distribute further until after their publication.

The photo shows Ruth and other Schumacher Society Research Fellows after an award ceremony in May 2025

On cultivating Research in Action

A letter exchange

Introduction

The Research in Action community (RinA) has been developing a distinctive space for practice-led research over the last seven years, supported by Schumacher Society, who steward funding and act as an awarding body for graduating Research Fellows. The community brings together practitioner-researchers from around the world, working both within and beyond academic institutions, to explore reflexive, action-oriented inquiries. The community is entering a new phase — with many members graduating, new members joining, and governance shifting towards more communal and distributed forms of leadership.

In the midst of these changes, founding member Dr Patricia Shaw and newly awarded Research Fellow Ruth Cross, engage in an exchange of letters that focus, not so much on the research projects themselves as on the evolving life of this unique research community. (A companion article by Ruth focuses more on her own research project)

Inspired by reading an exchange of letters between two students of the 20th century thinker Hannah Arendt, Patricia and Ruth reflect on what it means to research in the company of others — across disciplines, identities, and ways of knowing. The letter format offers a spacious, reflective form where ideas are revisited, differences surface, and the relational nature of inquiry is visible.

The letters:

Dear Patricia,

As we begin this exchange, I find myself reflecting on recently becoming an RinA Research Fellow and on what’s been most important to me in the development of my inquiry over these past five years. What stands out is the learning that happens between the research community itself — in peer groups. Not that this is more or less important than individual supervision, but it’s far less common for a research group to engage with each other’s work so deeply, over years and across diverse fields of practice. This, for me, is one of the major attractions of RinA. It is a critical distinction from what might habitually happen inside the structures of a university.

Peer accompaniment is a skill you have nurtured in the members of the community, not by formally teaching it, but through subtly tuning our capacity to stretch beyond our own work. You’ve invited us to step, with curiosity, into others’ fieldwork, their writing, and ways of thinking, so that we can enrich their work, and in doing so, enrich our own ways of seeing. My inquiry has been inextricably influenced and interwoven with the thinking of my peers, for example, Evelyn Roe’s work on remembering and forgetting, or Bia Tadema’s inquiry into walking on dangerous ground in educational contexts. It’s not that I’ve tried to become more like either of them, or that I’ve read their work simply to learn more about their respective fields. Actually, it’s often the distinctions between our ways of seeing the world, as much as the threads of connection, that help me more clearly define what my own inquiry is, and isn’t, about.

As the community matures and our capacity for being proactive peers increases, I’ve found joy in being part of a group that is learning to put less focus on its founder, and whose members continue to show up for one another, sharing attention and a commitment to phases of research that are co-held between us. There’s something both liberating and disorienting about relying on the responsibility and accountability of a field of peers to cultivate a rigorous practice of reflection and responsiveness, beyond the scaffolding of academic authority or a single convening leader. This seems especially important when the inquiries we follow are deeply reflective and action-oriented, and tend to evolve as we ourselves evolve as practitioner-researchers.

Warmly,

Ruth

Dear Ruth

I wondered how you would start this exchange. That you chose the theme of peer work strikes home with me. When I was involved in founding this research-in-action community back in 2017, I was influenced by Hannah Arendt’s way of thinking about action. She writes that it involves venturing forth in word and deed into the public realm, in the company of one’s peers. I found her phrases inspiring as a way of thinking about practice-led research. Sounds so appealing, yet none of this is easy, indeed it turns out to be rather challenging.

Firstly, peers, our co-researchers, are in some way exactly those whose interest and respect we hope for. It is somehow more demanding to open unpolished, tentative work to the scrutiny of those who we may be comparing ourselves with. More exposing in some ways than sharing work with mentors and supervisors who are expected to be more experienced. Also, classically, supervision is one to one, in private, it is more challenging to receive responses to unfinished work in small and larger groups, in public. But all learn when a researcher honestly shares their trials, their doubts, their questions in the middle of whatever they are inquiring into. I remember you, Ruth, at one of our research meetings, taking the risk of offering a raw piece of performance work as a way of exploring experiences of oppression that were relevant to your research with migrants working in Spain’s exploitative ‘plastic sea’, experiences that you felt might also mirror issues we were grappling with as a research community.

And there is the other side of the challenge: people worry that they do not have the background, the knowledge, the experience to comment usefully on the inquiries of others who are exploring in realms, and in ways, unfamiliar to them. They feel ‘unqualified’ to comment or simply bored by not finding a way in. I know I have felt stretched myself, and educated, by accompanying your performative methods. Cultivating both an attitude of curiosity and the ability to listen for what could be probed further in the work of others, is not just a research skill vital for interdisciplinary work, it is a life skill for participating in a plural world. I see a spiralling kind of capacity building: as researchers respond to the discerning curiosity of others, they hone their own ability to communicate what is essential and of wider significance in their own inquiry, and thus increase the potential influence of their work.

This brings me back to your first sentence about graduating, and I realise that the theme of thinking and working as peers continues, because RinA has been grappling with issues raised by going for peer recognition via the Schumacher Society Research Fellow Award, rather than relying solely on the usual university accreditation. We have been asking ourselves how to do that, reaching out to those who we aspire to be our peers, way beyond members of our research community, those who can assist in the work of sustaining high quality – what we want high quality to mean and show.

Appreciatively

Patricia

Dear Patricia,

In connection to graduating, I am encouraged to share with you my preparation behind-the-scenes in the months leading up to my graduation as an RinA Research Fellow. All of us were facing a big question: how do we present our research in public? As you say, working outside of the established PhD format means that we have to find meaningful ways for such bodies of research to meet the world.

I played for a long time with ideas about how to honour the rigour of my research and the responsibility of translating the stories of the migrant women I worked with in Spain’s Plastic Sea. I wanted to produce both a written scholarly piece and a live moment — a public event that would be an extension of the fieldwork, not just a presentation of its outcome. I booked the Totnes Cinema (Devon, UK), an intimate venue close to where the annual research gathering was being held. And then, the exciting and daunting prospect of finding an external reviewer. “Reach out to those we aspire to be our peers…” With this in mind, I invited Dr Ruth Pethybridge, curator of the new MA Dance: Participation, Communities and Activism, at The Place, London. In the end she couldn’t attend the Totnes performance in person, but did join online. Next morning, she initiated the Viva-like dialogue with the research community, which was the culminating assessment for the award. At one point she asked: “Is there ever a moment when we can trust that the body is enough?”. This question shifted the conversation into less expected terrain: when communicating research work, how much context is necessary, and how much can be left open for aesthetic, embodied exploration?

Another key moment came when Evelyn asked Ruth Pethybridge: “As someone deeply embedded in this field, do you see Ruth Cross's work as innovating and taking new directions?” Ruth responded by situating my work within global trends in performance research, particularly in how socially-engaged practices are translated into public events. She spoke of the craft of devising work from lived experience, the ethics of care involved, and recognised my contribution as expanding what performance research can do. As she spoke, I felt my body tingle: the work had been seen not just for its intention, but for its craft. She was confirming that I had articulated a distinct contribution to performance activism through an emphasis on ethics, risk, and rupture, and despite all my own continuing questions I was being seen as doing that by someone whose recognition I valued.

The current cohorts of new members have only just begun their inquiries. But if they continue, in around 4/5 years’ time, they too might be communicating their research in public— producing film work, exhibitions, public events, conferences, articles, books, public readings, and many other forms which I can’t yet imagine! So far, you have held the process of readying Research Fellows, alongside external reviewers. As Anna Lena, Bia, Juliana and myself, step in to take a lead in convening and supervising, (along with other RinA Fellows) we are already getting a first taste of the stretch you write of, as we practice this living-process of accompanying the work of others, sustaining a rigorous RinA level of quality, which already begins in the very first peer supervision sessions.

Warmly,

Ruth

Dear Ruth

Your telling of some of the story about what our peer accreditation process entailed for you, makes me want to pick up on another thread about peer work in your first letter, where you say it has been a joy for you to be part of a group putting less and less focus on its founder. This makes me smile ruefully and wish to relate how that process has been bumpy for me.

It was at our research meeting in June 2023 that I told the community of my promise to myself to support RinA for 5 years, in whatever way was needed, and then to start stepping back. And that time had arrived. Not because I was any less interested or committed, but because we all knew that only when I really ‘put down the backpack’ of responsibilities I had been carrying, would RinA mature into a next phase of more transparent shared influence with members taking different kinds of lead and evolving our governance. It took some time of honest, sometimes difficult dialogue for us all to see more of what that really entailed. That’s when our reflexive dialogue practice came into its own as we began shifting our community organising and the power relations that went with those. I was challenged to see where I continued to hold on, unhelpfully, to ‘being helpful’, or where I was stepping in unnecessarily, concerned to ‘hold’ what I have considered essential elements of our work, while vital new questions were being raised. Many moments where I felt perplexed, shaken, momentarily hurt. Other moments when I think members saw how they continued to ‘let me’ progress things out of habit, frustration or even laziness. But we persevered in challenging ourselves and each other and over the last two years it is striking what has developed.

For example, what was once a nice monthly virtual catch-up space - our ‘common room’ - has become a crucial monthly governance forum – the RinA Commons Room. Now a relay of members volunteer to prepare, host, and communicate outcomes from these meetings, where all can participate in decisions about organising and sustaining the increasingly varied aspects of the RinA community. It is members now, not me, who organise, both on-line and in-person research meetings. It is graduate members like yourself, who are designing and holding the sessions by which new members can join and start work within our community. It is members who have led the way in developing a new more public facing website. Above all, it is members who have been opening up further our community awareness to the crucial contemporary issues of unsustainability we need to seriously explore: from social justice issues like de-colonising and recognising whiteness, to the ned to research actual responses to threatening implications of climate change for all life.

With a sense of gratitude

Patricia

Dear Patricia,

I really recognise in your letter the process you, as a founder, have been, and still are, going through. Firmly committed to RinA’s changing future, yet wanting to ensure that the essence of RinA remains. It brings to mind the idea of living traditions — something that has surfaced, often raised by Martin, in our reflexive dialogue sessions. It feels increasingly important now, as those of us involved in convening and supervising new cohorts begin to draw on practices beyond RinA’s original lineage. A distinctive aspect of RinA is that we begin our inquiries from striking, yet still unformed moments of disquiet, disturbance, or excitement emerging in our lived experience. Then whatever thinking we draw on shapes what we see, what becomes recognisable, and what is validated as research. Much of RinA’s intellectual lineage — Arendt, Bortfoft, Goethe, Goodwin, Merleau-Ponty, Shotter, comes from European traditions. These thinkers have deeply shaped us. But as we begin to include different references, Afro-diasporic, Indigenous, feminist, abolitionist, our ways of thinking about research are necessarily changing.

I am left wondering how to honour RinA’s existing heritage, while allowing the interests and practices of those now taking it forward to open new directions. And I ask myself: how far can we stretch, what can we incorporate, and how rapidly, and yet not lose or loosen what we value so far?

A scene from one of the governance sessions at our last research gathering stands out. What happened was subtle — not traceable to a single comment. At the time, the community was trying to map how the new RinA activities I (and others) are initiating might relate to our current ways of organising. In doing so, something shifted. In the very act of engaging the larger community with emerging initiatives, I could feel the sense of agency I had been holding around this new activity beginning to diminish, and the risk that what felt fresh could slide back into an existing frame.

Another scene, also from our recent gathering: during one session, research member Adriana Puech shared her lifelong inquiry into South American Soul Initiation. It emerged from dreams, ritual, vocal soundings and guidance from spirit animals — a slow, sprawling, non-linear inquiry carried over decades. The work asked us to listen differently. Yet, in the responses (including my own), I noticed familiar lines of questioning — a pull toward familiar ground. Someone pressed for conceptual clarity. Despite a genuine desire to stay with the work, the moment revealed something important: how easily less familiar forms of inquiry can unsettle us — and how quickly we move to reinterpret or contain them, in an attempt to relieve the discomfort of difference.

I realise that I am writing as someone wondering how to take the RinA story onwards. I’m curious how what I write lands with you, as someone who has had such a formative influence on the story so far.

With love,

Ruth

Dear Ruth

The scenes you describe in your letter bring to mind for me yet other critical moments at our research gathering, for example when, Martin Daly, who worked with me from the early days, repeatedly drew our attention to the way fewer and fewer men are currently members of the research community and asked what we might be losing. And how awkward and risky it felt to ask that important question, when challenging patriarchy, gender attribution, as well as a dominant western white heritage, has been gathering ground in our conversations.

I appreciate very much the way you are bringing attention to questions arising at our edges as we evolve. The very fact that we are having this exchange points to how I think this story of our wayfaring research community goes on, even if I cannot see where it will go. (Although reading the early work of new cohort members is revelatory)

As this correspondence has unfurled between us, each of us has been reading from the start, amending, and responding further, in an iterative process that turns again and again, to go deeper and wider as we try to think with events and risk letting go of the bannisters. We have both noted that writing this exchange of letters has brought to the fore yet more issues we are only just beginning to glimpse and that we need to inquire into further as a research community.

You reminded me that a theme suggested by the editors for this issue of the Schumacher Magazine is The Great Turning, We are tracking in this correspondence a little of our own journeying as a community of inquiring practice. It is not for the faint-hearted and this work of turning reflexively again and again with one another in reflexive dialogue, is one of the key practices we sustain as a research collective in order to keep going. I really like what another Research Fellow Tim Crabtree drew on in his work, epitomised in this quote from the work of Gibson-Graham

The practice of the community economy is a fluid process of continual resignification, discarding any fantasy that there is a perfect community economy that lies outside of negotiation, struggle, uncertainty, ambivalence, and disappointment, discarding the notion that there's a blueprint that tells us what to do and how to "be communal."

Thanks for your accompaniment Ruth across the differences in our stages of life and work. I look forward to whatever comes next as we explore more ‘grit in the oyster’ in our approaches to researching, supervising and convening the RinA community.

Love to you,

Patricia