Global Dialogues

Join Mihir Bhatt, director of the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute, and Lili Hermann, professor in RISD’s Landscape Architecture Department, for a conversation about the notions of repair in the built environment. Moving from the large scale of communities and cities to individual buildings, they question and explore how we can repair our shared physical spaces. This conversation continues the expansive ideas presented in the Museum's exhibit Repair and Design Futures.
Free with admission.
Mihir Bhatt works on reducing risk-related action and learning. He has published widely on issues of vulnerability and disasters and has been part of key evaluations of disaster response in Asia. He is a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. He advises Climate Development Knowledge Network’s work on climate compatible development in nine states of India with focus on urban resilience, green finance, and renewable energy at subnational level. He chairs Duryog Nivaran, a South Asian network on alternative thinking on disaster risk reduction. He has recently published “The Interplay of Women, Work and Disasters: Missing Women’s View” and “Gender, disasters and development: opportunities for South-South cooperation” in a book titled Women and Disasters in South Asia: Survival, Security and Development; and “Using Disaster Insurance to Build Urban Resilience: Lessons from Micro-enterprise” in a book titled Urban Disaster Resilience: New Dimensions from International Practice in the Built Environment.
Elizabeth Dean Hermann is a Professor of Design and Social Justice in the Departments of Landscape Architecture and Architecture at RISD. She teaches graduate and undergraduate interdisciplinary courses on the urban built environment; transdisciplinary design in the context of social and economic development; urban water issues, poverty and land rights; sustainability and resilience; and critical cartography looking at issues of displacement, place and identity. Hermann is coordinator for RISD's first interdisciplinary undergraduate concentration in Nature, Culture and Sustainability. Hermann earned her Ph.D at Harvard University, where her work spanned architectural and urban history, history of medicine, and the history of the Middle East. Her work focused on the urban built environ­ment in the pre-modern Muslim world and changes driven by medical, Islamic doctrinal and political responses to pandemic disease and associated environmental upheaval.