Research in Action Community: Exchanges Behind the Scenes
An exchange of letters between Ruth Cross, who graduated in 2025 as a Schumacher Society Research Fellow (RinA) and is now Community Convenor for this international community of practice, and Patricia Shaw, the original founder.
Dear Patricia,
Being a member of the RinA community for 7 years has increased my capacity to act in public and to let my thinking be changed by reflecting with others on what happens there. This has shaped my research, and it has changed the kind of authority I’m willing to rely on. RinA insists that our research begins close to our own scenes of action. We learn to think with those scenes. We build our enquiry from what calls us inside our work and life contexts and explore how that may have wider resonance.
I think of the times I have left RinA sessions confronted by my inability to make myself understood ‘across a gap’. For example, being asked to describe my experience of my racial identity, beyond being white, in a peer group discussion of my writing. We were exploring the complexity of colonial relationships, past and present, within my social justice work with migrants from west Africa. I felt such waves of frustration at being met with views that seemed to me outdated… only to be disturbed and exhilarated by feeling my world being prised open as I found new ways to explain my thinking. I had to articulate my own experience of whiteness and its implications in my work, whilst simultaneously experiencing the issues of whiteness in the community. If I had been with other researchers also working as activists with frontline communities and who were versed in the same anti-racist language, I wouldn't have been pressed to convey more clearly what it was I was trying to say. To be understood I was called to break down my own assumptions about a political landscape I took for granted. I had to describe the significance of my work without using ‘insider’ vocabulary.
In RinA I’ve experienced peer accompanimentin ways I haven’t found in other communities of practice. We don't come together around the same field of practice. Instead, I research alongside an economist, a visual artist, and an ethnobotanist! I’ve had to grapple with how to respond to a composer in France researching soundscapes and attention; a researcher in the UK working with farmers rediscovering hemp for local ecological housing; an educator in Brazil trying to make sense of the ethical dilemmas that arise when children play freely in nature.
So, what is it in this context to be an active peer?
We have built the capacity to risk disturbing and frustrating the person sharing (as others did with me). This requires new forms of listening, not only to the work, but to the moment in myself that wants to withdraw, defer, or dismiss because I feel out of my depth. In RinA, peer accompaniment means getting involved in each other's thinking, not just in each other's research projects. We spend a week together in person each year, as well as months of online work: a mix of webinars, community dialogues, small group supervision, drafts passed around, the fragile beginning of work exposed long before it is polished. We ask each other to stay for uncomfortable lengths of time with unformed and fragmented ideas.
And it is made harder, and more alive, by the range of work.There is also something refreshing when artistic, poetic, performative enquiry is not treated as a nice addition to “real” research, when academic work is not treated as the only route to rigour. However, we do face up to the question of ‘appropriateness’ or ‘standards of quality’. We are learning to notice and name when old hierarchies reassert themselves. Or when the work offered remains in the area of personal development, therapeutic journaling, or data collection that is not yet research in action.
You nurtured peer accompaniment from the earliest days, for yourself and all of us. What do you see us actually developing – and what do you think we are all still, even now, learning as we try to accompany each other across difference?
And… as the community learns to rely less on you as founder and more on shared responsibility, what has that been like for you?
Warmly,
Ruth
Dear Ruth,
I wondered how you would start this exchange. That you chose the theme of peer work strikes home with me. The other day you recalled a gathering in Spain when a group was exploring the work of the political thinker Hannah Arendt who has been a big influence on me. You said that I had suggested that people stand and try speaking aloud words of the kind she often used.. And to do so in their own language, so as to sense in their bodies what speaking the words aroused: Action means to venture forth, in word and deed, into the public realm, in the company of one’s peers.
And I remember you, Ruth, at one of our research meetings, taking the risk of offering a raw piece of performance work. You were exploring experiences of oppression that were relevant to your own research with migrants. In the twisting, straining, and discomfort of your body you made vivid what it means to disturb existing conventions. This rang bells on many levels, not just about your work but when stretching or breaking conventions in research, or in our own culture as a community. It took courage to make that move as a deed, an action in a live tense moment. But from that deed words flowed and a much more robust discussion developed on how we might be colluding in oppressive processes amongst ourselves. Words ARE deeds, when voices are raised in public settings. I am continuing to learn how people can enquire together as peers despite structural inequalities, and big differences in their fields, backgrounds, and life stages
So one important way I think we meet each other’s work as peers is as experiencing bodies, involved in scenes of action with other experiencing bodies. We keep returning to a shared predicament: that we are all embodied players, implicated in the scenes we are exploring, where each is uniquely capable of responding to whatever is appearing. Our practice of attending to and narrating scenes of embodied experience allows us to recognise one another’s work across many fields of enquiry.
You ask what I think we are still learning to do. I think we still struggle with those moments when accompaniment requires interrupting. We are learning to tolerate the heat of that: the risk of offending, the risk of misreading, the risk of being wrong – and still speaking. We are learning to distinguish between interruption that comes with preconceived ideas and judgement, and interruption that is responsive and discerning. Appreciating this is essential to fruitful dialogue and that the latter holds the promise of new insight.
You also ask what it has been like for me as the community learns to rely less on the founder and more on shared responsibility. I will answer plainly: it has been necessary, and it has been bumpy.
It was at our research meeting in June 2023 that I told the community that, after supporting the community in whatever way was needed since its founding in 2017, I would be starting to step back. That’s when our practice of regular open community dialogues came into its own. I was challenged to see where I continued to try, unhelpfully, to be helpful: where I was continuing to hold essential elements of our work. 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 how the power relations of the community have shifted. I think we have learned a lot in this process, especially as these transitions from a founding generation to the next, so often stir conflictual dynamics, as they did amongst us.
Thanks for this exchange, 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.
With gratitude,
Patricia
Dear Patricia,
What you say makes me think about living traditions: what we refuse to let die – and what we must change. As I and others from this second generation step into convening and supervising, our question is “what ends, what stays, and enters as RinA shifts?”
There’s a big shake up going on in the whole field of research. An intellectual heritage that was dominated by Western traditions is being challenged and permeated with other ideas and traditions from around the world. In RinA too, our research is changing as we begin to learn from these other ways of seeing and thinking. It’s a great moment for me to take up the role of community convenor, where I can work to keep all of these issues alive.
With love,
Ruth