Internationally-renowned sociologist and philosopher is a science councilor at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, a full professor at the University of London, and a regular visiting lecturer at other foreign universities. She is also the leader and member of numerous research teams at home and abroad. Her research work is highly interdisciplinary, intertwining cultural studies and criminology with psychoanalysis and philosophy. More recently, the subject of her research has been the link between law, neuroscience, and genetics.

The main focus of more recent works by Renata Salecl is the question of subjectification in the context of the ideology of the technological progress, which she has articulated in her literary blockbusters such as “Izbira” and “O tesnobi”. These works link her early interest in theoretical psychoanalysis of Lacanian school with the analysis of new forms of ideology and control that arise from genetics, neuroscience and other “hard” sciences, including informational science of the modern age. In her own way, she observes through the prism of the Lacanian psychoanalysis the changes and interaction that emerges between the society and individual on one side and the modern technological progress on the other: how the individual becomes a subject, how they face anxiety and (un) enlightenment, in the circumstances of the rapid technological advancement.

The topic of Renata Salecl's Ph.D. is ideology and control. Two books emerged from her dissertation: the Slovenian one called Zakaj ubogamo oblast, and the English one called The Spoils of Freedom. She focused on the problem of ideological control and disciplining of people, and the question of their responses (passivity, etc.). She primarily followed Foucault, Althusser and the problems of subjectivity, as analyzed by Lacanian psychoanalysis. The topic has had a longterm impact on her research journey. She kept coming back to it through new and current aspects.