Professor Ksenia Chmutina

MA PhD FHEA

Pronouns: She/her
  • Professor of Disaster Studies
  • Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies
  • Special Envoy for East Asia

Research and expertise

My main interests and expertise lie within:

 

  • Disaster risk creation in the context of neoliberal policies and post-colonialism
  • Disaster capitalism
  • Disaster science communication
  • Role of language and narrative in disaster risk reduction
  • Synergies, tensions, and trade-offs between urban sustainability and resilience
  • Disaster risk management of cultural heritage
  • Games and participatory methodologies for disaster risk reduction

 

Recent research projects

  • Gender Responsive Resilience and Intersectionality in Policy and Practice (GRRIPP) - Networking Plus Partnering for Resilience: GRRIPP brings together partners from Latin America and the Caribbean, Southern Africa, South Asia, and the UK to disrupt mainstream development discussions on gender. Our particular focus is on resilience and with a special emphasis on gender-responsive infrastructure; we seek to understand and enhance people’s resilience to shocks, and support the development of more sustainable infrastructure, in all its diverse forms.

  • Beyond the networked city: This GCRF-funded project focuses on building innovative delivery systems for water, sanitation, and energy in urban Africa. It aims to enhance the delivery of sustainable and resilient water, sanitation, and energy services to marginalised communities in Freetown, Sierra Leone,  and Kampala, Uganda through high-quality research that develops a mixed economy model of on-grid and off-grid systems. Central to our thinking is that both on-grid and off-grid systems should provide users with the same safety and adequacy of service.

Previous research projects

 

  • Risk-Related: This project has been developed and delivered in collaboration with RADAR (LU Arts’ commissioning and research programme). A series of commissions explore risk and its social, ecological, and economic relations.
  • Urban vulnerability, risks, safety, and security: Researcher Links Workshop Grant was delivered with Tsinghua University’s Institute for Public Safety and aimed at creating a shared research agenda to address security challenges posed by and to urbanisation in China and the UK that will create new practice underpinned by theory, with research that addresses both theory and practice.
  • Enhancing urban flood resilience for 1 million people through Blue-Green Infrastructure in Semarang, Indonesia (BUGIS): The Newton Fund project aims to increase the flood resilience of Semarang by integrating Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) concepts into the development of that city’s drainage. BGI is an approach that integrates water management and green infrastructure to replicate natural water cycles. This aim will be achieved by developing a sustainable Flood Risk Management Strategy for Semarang that embraces the technical (structural and non-structural) approaches of BGI and aligns them with local community-based activities. The project will seek to integrate future research and development (R&D) into urban development planning with a heightened capacity for resilience against the impacts of climate change.
  • ‘Thinking Inside the Box': A Mixed Reality Development Platform for co-creating energy efficient retail spaces’: This research project is an EPSRC-funded study to test the feasibility of the next generation of decision support models with regards to informing energy demand reduction strategies in the built environment. The selected Research Associate (RA) will contribute 100% of their time for the 17 months duration of the project. The project explores a new method of integrating multiple user perspectives into the design for enhanced energy reduction and indoor environmental performance. Instead of proposing and modelling the effect of abrupt changes, our work will test the feasibility of an MRDP – a multi-user serious gaming environment deployed within the space that it is designed to influence - to enable the co-creation of socio-technical interventions.
  • Building Resilience in Nepal: This GCRF Frontiers of Engineering for Development Seed-funded project led by the University of York aims to better understand the effectiveness of advice for increasing the resilience of buildings and to improve knowledge exchange with informal construction stakeholders in Nepal.
  • UK-India Smart Cities for Sustainable Future Cities: SMArt CitIES Network for Sustainable Urban Futures (SMARTIES Net) is a collaborative partnership between British and Indian academics led by the University of Nottingham. The project aims to establish a multi-disciplinary consortium of researchers specialising in a range of fields including engineering, social science, urban planning, and heritage. Through a variety of engagement activities, including multi-stakeholder workshops in seven Indian cities, an entrepreneurship competition, and a variety of publications, the project will support the development of integrated policy strategies for selected cities in India.
  • The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Small Grant for the facilitation of collaboration in the area of climate change impacts on, and improved disaster risk management for, cultural heritage sites in Japan and the UK.