Dr. Kavita Ramakrishnan is Associate Professor in Geography and Global Development at the University of East Anglia. She is an urban geographer who specializes in experiences of belonging, informality, and everyday life on the margins.

Her research to date focuses on three strands: 1) the lived experiences of eviction and resettlement in India; 2) refugee provisioning, care, and asylum-seeking in European cities; and most recently, 3) embodied experiences of heat in Indian cities.

 Her work has been funded by external grants (see below) and has published solo and collaboratively authored work in journals such as Antipode, CITY, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Environment and Planning E: Environment and Space, Humanity, and Political Geography.

Finally, she is interested in collective methodologies as a mode to disrupt traditional/colonial forms of knowledge production.

Current grants: 

2023-2025: 'Just Housing Futures in the North Sea Region' (funded by the AHRC Rapid Response Funding; in collaboration with Dr. Casper Laing Ebbensgaard, University of East Anglia).

2024-2026: 'Heat Imaginaries: Making Sense of Extreme Climate Conditions in Urban India’ (funded by the British Academy Wolfson Fellowship).                                                                                                       

Recently finished grants:

2021-2022: 'Time, space, belonging and mental health: participatory explorations of Black and minority ethnic doctoral student experiences' (funded by the Student Mental Health Research Network (SMaRteN), in collaboration with Dr. Esther Priyadharshini and Farhana Ghaffar, University of East Anglia).

2016-2017: 'Temporary migrants or new European citizens? Geographies of intergration and response between 'camps' and the city' (British Academy funded project in collaboration with Dr. Tatiana Thieme and Dr. Eszter Kovacs, University College London).

Her doctoral research on lived experiences of resettlement in peri-urban Delhi continues to shape her interests in housing justice. 

Kavita Ramakrishnan is a geographer interested in the politics, livelihoods and subaltern practices on the urban margins.

She joined UEA's School of International Development in September 2015. She holds a PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge as well as a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Southern California. Both her MPhil and PhD studies were funded by the Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

Prior to her appointment at UEA, Kavita worked with the Cambridge-based start-up, Africa's Voices, where she managed an interactive radio program for UNICEF-Somalia and evaluated youth conversation change for a Nairobi-based social marketing agency.