Researcher | Project: STRATEGIES
Ruth Dorothea Eggel is a cultural anthropologist and gender studies scholar with a focus on digital ethnography of technosocial lifeworlds and the anthropology of play and games. Inspired by feminist science and technology studies, she likes to engage in playful thinking and tinkering in her academic work. To explore the interplay of techno-logics and socio-material configurations of practice, she appreciates the micro-analytical approach of ethnography and its ability to adapt and develop customised tools for qualitative empirical inquiries.
Research Priorities
With her passion for planetary issues of ecological sustainability, Ruth is excited to explore sustainable game development practices in the STRATEGIES project. In her dissertation “Embodying Gaming” at the University of Bonn, she analysed the semiotic-material re-configurations and the embodied enactments of digital gaming culture at gaming events in Europe. She holds MA degrees in cultural anthropology and interdisciplinary gender studies from the University of Graz. Enthusiastic about interdisciplinary research and academic exchange, she is a member of the STS research collective “RUSTLab”, the “Digital Anthropology Lab” and the “Code Ethnography Collective”.
Research Project
STRATEGIES: Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries — is a Horizon Europe funded project that supports Europe’s game industries in realising their potential as drivers of sustainable innovation, contributing to achieving the goals of the European Green Deal and delivering an economy that works for people.
Europe’s game developers are a vital cultural and creative industry whose capacity to meet climate goals must be achieved as a matter of urgency. To address the challenges and opportunities facing Europe’s game developers, the STRATEGIES project offers a programme of research devised by small and micro game developers at the forefront of green transformations, non-governmental organisations supporting business development of the game industries in Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands, experts working at the intersection of policy and sustainability science, and academics working at the leading-edge of the study of games and climate change.
Teaching
Ruth has taught courses on qualitative methods and ethnography, digital anthropology, the anthropology of games, feminist and postcolonial critique, and urban anthropology at the Universities of Bonn, Graz, and Vienna.
