Ruth Amstutz, MA
CV
Ruth studied Visual Communication at the Berne University of the Arts and at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Thereafter she worked as a graphic designer, artdirector, and project manager. In 2013 her work on the conception and design of Reportagen (a magazine for literary long-form journalism) was awarded with the Design Prize Switzerland. In the same year she started studying Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Universities of Lucerne and Zurich and at the Université du Québec à Montréal. In 2019 she obtained her Masters Degree and started working on her dissertation project as a PhD Candidate within the SNF Sinergia Project “In the Shadow of the Tree: The Diagrammatics of Relatedness as Scientific, Scholarly, and Popular Practice.” In her dissertation she explores discourses revolving around multiraciality and hybridity that in the late 1980s come up in human population genetics as well as in the humanities. She thereby focuses on the ways in which, at the turn to the twenty-first century, when for the first time it became possible to calculate and represent human genetic admixture, human genetic diversity is produced through diagrammatic tools, visualizations, and metaphors. Moreover, she inquires how the resulting knowledge of human genetic diversity is received – and ignored – in philosophical debates about the ontological status and the semantics of race.
Research interests:
- Philosophy and History of Science
- Feminist theories
- Critical philosophy of race
- Visual Culture
- Mediality
- Artistic research
