Luise Ruge is a 2020 Visiting Research Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at the Innovation, Society, and Public Policy Research Group at the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), Technical University Munich. In her doctoral research, Luise explores regional imaginaries of innovation in German city-regions. 

She particularly aims to understand how different regions envision desirable futures through or against innovation and how city administrations become innovation actors in their own right. More broadly, Luise is interested in how innovation relates to local identities, socio-economic histories, and political cultures. In her research, she wants to show how the notion of “innovation” itself is co-produced in keeping with locally specific diagnoses of societal deficits and equally specific understandings of acceptable pathways to address these gaps.

Luise holds a B.A. in political and sustainability science from Leuphana Universität Lüneburg and received an M.A. in Science and Technology Studies at Technical University Munich. During her Masters, she conducted research on Munich, Germany, in the National Science Foundation project “Traveling Imaginaries of Innovation.“