Charissa Leiwakabessy is a political scientist and PhD researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. She is currently completing her dissertation on recognition, misrecognition, governance and energy justice in urban energy transitions.

Her doctoral research forms part of the NWO-funded Just Prepare consortium, which examines how the energy transition can be made more just in underprivileged neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. Within the project, her research focuses on recognition justice and, in particular, on how citizens and communities become recognised or misrecognised by public institutions during processes of societal transformation.

Drawing on interpretive political science and extensive qualitative fieldwork in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, she studies how recognition and misrecognition are produced through everyday practices of governance. Her research combines institutional ethnography, participant observation, shadowing of frontline professionals, narrative interviewing, discourse analysis and document analysis. Rather than approaching recognition only as a principle of justice, she examines how it operates in practice through the ways institutions define problems, interpret citizens' needs and experiences, organise participation and determine whose knowledge becomes visible and consequential.

Her broader research interests lie at the intersection of institutional recognition and misrecognition, democratic and institutional governance, political theory, climate and energy justice, and societal transformation. She is particularly interested in how public institutions respond to complex forms of difference and how institutional arrangements can enable or constrain more just forms of social and political change.

Alongside her doctoral research, she is a researcher on the project Understandings of Colonialism by Dutch Moluccans and Implications for Colonial Repair at the University of Amsterdam. This work further develops her interest in recognition, historical injustice, institutional responses and the different meanings that justice and repair can take across communities.

Charissa obtained her MSc in Political Science from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2021, graduating cum laude. Before starting her PhD, she worked as a research assistant at the University of Amsterdam. Her work has been published in Energy Research & Social Science, alongside collaborative research published in Buildings & Cities and in 2025 she won the National Essay Competition of the Dutch National Programme for Regional Energy Strategies (NP RES).