Profile
Kavitha is a transdisciplinary researcher whose academic work intersects organisations, design, anthropology, sustainability, spatial studies, creative practice, and socio-cultural context.
Her professional background in strategy, innovation and research spans impact investment, healthcare consulting, and corporate roles in the chemical industry. This is complemented by sustained, project-based engagement with the third sector, start-ups, and creative practice.
Interests and activities
Dr. Ravikumar’s doctoral research explored the spaces of collective imagination by focusing on how the spatiality of organising can enable the imagining of desirable futures. The research adopted a developmental stance and was inspired by the principles of engaged scholarship. It used a transdisciplinary approach to leverage concepts that address complex, real-world sustainability related phenomena, bridging theory with practice and reinforcing the understanding that desirable futures are dynamic, emergent, and relational.
Areas of academic interest
- Sustainability
- Sustainable/Desirable Futures
- Organisation studies
- Research through Design (RtD)
- Spaces and place
- Ethnography
- Creative methods
- Collective Imagination
- Plurality
- Materials
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.
Professional associations
- Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN)
- British Academy of Management
- The British Academy
Publications
- Ravikumar K. (2026), Imagining futures in the present: Conceptualising prefigurative impulses through the politics of organising, (ed) Sareen S. and Juhola S., Societal Transitions to Sustainability: The prefigurative politics of present transformation, Palgrave Studies in Environmental Transformation, Transition and Accountability, Palgrave Macmillan
- Ravikumar, K., & Bertmark, A. (2024). Tomorrow’s Barbie: Collective imagining beyond borders. Collective Imagination Practice Publication
- Ravikumar, Kavitha (2023). In the know with stripes! (Zine). Wellcome Collection
- 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). Objects in the familiar: Systemic contexts of
production. Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD11),
October 3–16, 2022, Brighton, United Kingdom. - Ravikumar K. (2022). ‘Threads, old and new’. U+Zine 7 “Clothes”, Plurality
University Network Loughborough repository.