KCL
King’s College London is one of England’s oldest and most prestigious university institutions: a multi-faculty research-led university college based in the heart of London. Ranked as one of the world’s top 20 universities (QS World Rankings 2013), King’s offers an intellectually rigorous environment supported by welcoming and caring traditions, and the opportunity for students to be taught or supervised by academics who are often leaders in their field.
Centre for Integrated Research on Risk and Resilience
King’s College London hosts the Centre for Integrated Research on Risk and Resilience (CIRRR). CIRRR aims to integrate research across disciplines and areas of research on risk and resilience, to create new knowledge and push the boundaries of knowledge. It also aims to integrate research and policy concerns, thus mobilising newest developments in knowledge to respond to policy domains which require integrated research on risk and resilience.
Our approach to risk and resilience is:
- Critical: Resilience is a key concept on research and policy agendas. As with all concepts that open new avenues, resilience is often unquestioned, its normative values, promises and techniques adopted or simply finessed. The Centre takes seriously the need for a critique of resilience, in order to understand its limits, reformulate its legacies and prepare for better futures. Risk has similarly risen to influence policy and academic analysis, and the implications of this for the deployment of public resources, and for assumptions about safety in society and reasonable government responsibility have all shifted as a result.
- Collaborative: Resilience has travelled widely across areas of concerns and problems of governance. Our research will be collaborative in order to understand the differences that underpin resilience, how it has been and is being articulated with other responses to risk and uncertainty, and how it might have been transformed in translation across policy areas. By working across disciplinary and policy domains and through a joined up approach to risk and resilience discourse it becomes possible to explore the grand narratives that are emerging from this new policy nexus and its interaction with unmet development challenges of social justice and sustainability.
- Creative: The IRRR Centre supports research that expands the boundaries of knowledge, and combines theoretical advances with a range of empirical fields and questions. Confronting the challenges of development through risk and resilience includes the search for novel methodologies and for new positioning of research, pubic engagement and policy impact. Creative methodologies that can interact with those at risk and risk managers or those seeking to build resilience as part fo a research and impact strategy are a priority.
Areas of Research
The Centre has five core areas of integrated research:
