Researcher
(predoc)
Valuing, Being, Knowing

Tel: +43-1-4277-26103
eMail: ruth.falkenberg@univie.ac.at

Biography

Ruth Falkenberg is a PhD student and research assistant at the Research Platform "Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in Academic Practice", working in the project “Valuing, Being and Knowing in Research Practices”. In the project, Maximilian Fochler, Lisa Sigl, and Ruth Falkenberg closely collaborate with three research groups from the crop and soil sciences to explore 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 valuation practices in academia. In particular, she is interested in notions of ‘innovativeness’ as a particular way of ascribing worth to research and what kinds of research come to be understood as innovative in the current scientific system. Her dissertation moreover explores how the currently predominating orientation towards novel, cutting-edge, and innovative research relates to and is intertwined with the aim of producing knowledge that makes meaningful contributions to current socio-environmental problems.

Ruth has completed the master programme Science, Technology, and Society at the university of Vienna in June 2019. 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.