Sebastian Potthof is a founding member and treasurer of VisAbility. He was also responsible for the photo documentation for VisAbility’s pilot project “Making Ability Visible”.

As a result of working and travelling over the last few years with the German mixed-abled Dance Company DIN A 13 to, among others, Sri Lanka, India and Venezuela, he has become strongly interested in dance and matters of development work.

Mr. Potthof holds an MA in Modern History, with minors in Geography and Philosophy, from the University of Cologne (Germany). His final thesis addressed a critical post-colonial view on imperial-colonial discourses within German travel literature on the Ottoman Empire around 1900. Furthermore he undertook a year of study at the Yeditepe University Istanbul (Turkey) with an emphasis on political philosophy.

Recently, he completed a Master’s programme in Anthropology and Development Studies (MSc) at the Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands). For his field research he went to Cameroon, subsequently finalising a thesis on lobby and advocacy for people with disabilities, with a case study on inclusive education. The research was approached from a post-positive perspective and generated data and an understanding of the phenomenon of organisational capacity through the triangulation of multiple methods of qualitative procedures. The research was part of a research partnership between the African Studies Centre (ASC) in Leiden and the non-profit Liliane-Foundation (Netherlands) that is engaged in promoting the rights of children with disabilities worldwide. ‘Breaking down Barriers to Inclusion – Building Capacity for Lobby and Advocacy for Children with Disabilities’ is a project that seeks to understand the factors that determine the success of lobby and advocacy.

Sebastian Potthof was born in Bergisch Gladbach (Germany) in 1983 and has worked as a caretaker since 2011.