Profile
Kavitha has first class degrees in Economics and Anthropology, extensive professional experience in corporates, consulting, and start-ups as well as project-based involvement in the third/creative sectors.
PhD research
Sustainable Futures: Exploring sites of collective imagination in organisational contexts.
Kavitha’s research is framed around the desirability of sustainability aspirations and corresponding acts of imagination as being part of collective sustainable futures. Her research looks at future contexts, the elements of which have become increasingly important in the context of sustainability. In many economic areas, this is often directed towards minimising unsustainability, and this results in a practice of the survival mode rather than take a turn towards creating sustainability or flourishing.
Since sustainable futures do not exist and must be imagined into existence, her interest is in specific organisational contexts that have aspirational visions, understand businesses and societies as both giving and receiving and part of the larger natural world in actively trying to incorporate sustainability considerations from the onset.
Areas of academic interest
- Sustainability
- Sustainable/Desirable Futures
- Organisation studies
- Research through Design (RtD)
- Spaces and place
- Ethnography
- Creative methods
- Collective Imagination
- Plurality
- Materials
PhD supervisors
Professor Mikko Koria, Dr Jukka Rintamäki (Aalto University) and Dr Sharon Prendeville.
Awards, grants or scholarships received
Kavitha has received a studentship to pursue her PhD at Loughborough University London. She was the recipient of a visiting scholar travel grant from Image Space Material: Cluster of Excellence at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2022. She also received project funding in 2023 (with Anna Bertmark) from Huddlecraft & CIPC, funded by JRF's Emerging Futures Team to deliver experimental workshops in UK and Portugal.
Papers, publications and articles
- Ravikumar K., (2023), Objects in the Familiar: Systemic contexts of production, Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSDX) 2022 Symposium.
- Beech, N., Fadina, D., Betancour, A., Sengupta, T., Mann, E., Schuldenfrei, R., Ravikumar, K. and Mejía Moreno, C., (2022), Unsettled Subjects/unsettling landscapes: confronting questions of architecture in CLR James’s The Black Jacobins, Field Journal, vol.8 (1)
- Ravikumar K., (2022), ‘Threads, old and new’, U+Zine 7 “Clothes”, Plurality University Network Loughborough repository.
- Ravikumar, Kavitha; Bertmark, Anna (2024). Beyond manufactured potential: transitioning into imagining plural futures [Abstract]. Loughborough University. Conference contribution.
- Ravikumar, Kavitha; Bertmark, Anna (2024). Tomorrow’s Barbie : Collective Imagining Beyond Borders. Loughborough University. Online resource.
Professional associations
European Group for Organisation Studies (EGOs).
Interests and activities
Kavitha has eclectic interests that include playing racket sport, swimming, yoga, art and craft, poetry and creative writing, travelling, photography, urban experimental gardening, material experimentation, upcycling, and listening to BBC Radio 4 podcasts.