Deljana Iossifova

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT DELJANA IOSSIFOVA

I am Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Manchester School of Architecture (University of Manchester) where I lead the Urban Studies Lab and direct the Confucius Institute. Currently, I am Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Architecture, a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Urban Studies Foundation (having served as Chair for the maximum two terms 20••••23), Chair of the Board of the AzuKo Foundation, and member of the RIBA President\'s Awards for Research Working Group. I was trained as an architect at ETH Zurich and hold a PhD in Public Policy Design from Tokyo Institute of Technology.I am broadly interested in the dynamics between architecture, everyday life, urban transformations, and global environmental change. I employ innovative ethnographic methods alongside other relevant approaches to explore these dynamics. I rely on systems thinking and draw from social practice and complexity theories to study how infrastructures serve to mediate the relationship between everyday life (practices) and social, cultural, environmental, technical, and economic systems across multiple spatial and temporal scales. This requires recognising the value of and combining often radically opposed ontological perspectives. Geographically, my research spans diverse contexts, including China, Japan, India, Bulgaria, England, Brazil, and Sub-Saharan Africa.My work has attracted over £1.3m in external funding as principal investigator from a diverse set of national and international agencies, including UKRI (ESRC, NERC), the Royal Society, British Council, the Daiwa and Great Britain Sasakawa Foundations. I head the international and transdisciplinary research programme Sustainable Infrastructure (SusInfra), providing leadership on a range of projects around the themes outlined above.