HS/SE  How Does Gender Shape Science? The Intermingling of Gender and Science in Historical Contexts

Maria Rentetzi and Elena Serrano

LV-Nr. 3131 L 132

BA-KulT WTG 4 MA-GKWT 2, 5/1, 7/1 MA-TGWT WTG 3,4 MA FW 7, 8, 9, 10

Block seminar

Preliminary meeting: Fri, April 24, 2020, 2 p.m. - 4 p.m.

Termine: May 23-24, 2020 and May 30-31, 20202020, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

This seminar is offered as an online course: Please find more Information on the seminar's ISIS website [1]

Gender interacts with knowledge in multiple ways. From the very questions that we choose to ask or not to ask, to the way research is conducted, to the language and images we use for thinking, discussing and communicating, science reflects the gendered values of the societies that produced and consumed it. Organized around four broad themes that have structured main lines of research in gender studies –Sites, Languages, Boundaries, and Identities, the course explores ways that gender influenced the development of scientific ideas and instances in which science naturalized gendered assumptions. The course aims a) to teach how to use gender as an analytical tool in historical research, and b) to unearth ways that gender contributes to our understanding of present-day scientific issues. In addition to secondary and primary sources, we will pay special attention to graphic and material sources (images, video-clips, and scientific models, such as wax anatomical models).    

Rentetzi, Maria.  Gender, politics, and radioactivity research in interwar Vienna: the case of the Institute for Radium Research, Isis, Vol. 95, No 3, September 2004, 359–393. Serrano, Elena. “Chemistry in the city: The scientific role of fmale societies in late eighteenth-century Madrid”. Ambix, 60 No. 2, May 2013, 139–159.