Ruth Falkenberg BSc., MA.

Researcher

Biography

Ruth Falkenberg is a PhD student and research assistant at the Research Platform “Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in Academic Practice”. Together with Maximilian Fochler and Lisa Sigl she works in the Valuing, Being and Knowing in Research Practices. In this project, they accompany three research groups from the academic life sciences for more than two years in order to investigate how valuation practices and processes of subjectification are entangled with strategic decisions in the researchers’ work.

In her PhD project Ruth thus pursues her broader interest in cultures of knowledge production and in valuation practices in academia. In particular, she is interested in how such valuation practices are affected by the changing living and working conditions in academia under the increasing influence of neoliberal forms of governance, and how this in turn affects academic knowledge production.

In June 2019, Ruth has completed the master programme Science, Technology, and Society at the university of Vienna. In her master thesis she has dealt with valuations in medical yoga research. In doing so, she has focused on the situated valuations that researchers perform in negotiating the encounter between yoga and biomedicine theoretically and methodologically, as well as on how these concrete valuations are influenced by broader institutional, structural, and discursive regimes of valuation.