Ruth is Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne where she has taught for over 20 years. Originally Canadian, she now researches as an interdisciplinary social scientist in social and ecological systems—exploring landscape policy and planning, and landscape management and environment to pursue participatory and community-based enquiry. Ruth’s research covers the impact of production regimes on the social fabric of rural and regional people and their places, resilience in disaster and risk management of landscapes (fire, flood and sea rise in the Australian context), and, more recently, studies our understanding of the social construction of knowledge (I.e. In adaptive management and the further commodification of nature) through discourse analysis.