Her teaching and research are centred on embodiment, the senses and everyday life, with a particular interest in everyday practices of sustainability. In recent years she has studied the environmental dimensions of the revival of domestic chicken-keeping in Sydney. Her current research centres on everyday life as a space of informal environmental education. Ruth is the author of Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices (2013); Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Bodies, Therapies, Senses (2011), Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (2004), and the co-editor of Imagining Australian Space: Cultural Studies and Spatial Inquiry (1999) and Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning (1997).