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- Associate Professor in Education
- IOE - Education, Practice & Society
- UCL Institute of Education
Kaori Kitagawa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education, Practice and Society, Institute of Education. Her research interests have been learning outside of formal education systems, with an application of comparative perspectives. Her current focus is disaster preparedness, particularly concerning community engagement and participation. Obtaining grants from the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the Anglo-Japan Daiwa Foundation, and the UCL Global Engagement Fund, she has developed a conceptual framework and methodology to investigate community preparedness and resilience. Considering preparedness activities as co-learning applying pedagogical perspectives, she has published widely in disaster research journals as well as educational journals. She has also worked with international collaborators on interdisciplinary projects, such as the 'Critical infrastructure collapse and population response' project funded by ESRC, which was five-country comparative research on preparedness. In 2020, she was based at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University as visiting academic undertaking fieldwork in rural communities in western Japan that were severely affected by flooding. Her most recent collaboration includes the study on climate change adaptation in indigenous communities in Fiji in the 'Transforming universities for a changing climate' project funded by GCRF.
My research areas
- Community preparedness and resilience
- Disaster/preparedness education
- Public pedagogy
- Lifelong learning
- Comparative analysis
- Disaster politics
- International - Japan
She is currently responsible for amaster-level module ‘Reimagining disaster education: perspectives andmethodologies'. She developed the module launched in the academic year 2021/22. The module takes a broad view of disaster 'education' and discusses innovative and inclusive perspectives and methodologies for disaster education developed worldwide. Ten sessions draw on her own research materials, as well as her collaborators' diverse work. She also has extensive experience in teaching at all levels from Foundation Degree, and Master to Doctoral level courses of which delivery modes are both online and face-to-face.
2018 | ATQ03 - Recognised by the HEA as a Fellow | University College London |