Seminar: 'The Historiography of Gender and Science' by Maria Rentetzi - CEHIC, Barcelona, 4 February 2011

"The Historiography of Gender and Science", by Maria Rentetzi
at the CEHIC, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, February 4, 2011.

The talk will take place at Casa de Convalescència (Hospital de Sant Pau), 11 h.
Casa de Convalescència
http://www.uabcampus.com/cat/index_vert2.html

Gender in the History of Science

The paper explores the history of science from a gender perspective and covers a wide range of gender studies on science. It is intended to familiarize students both with the history of women’s modes of participation in science and theoretical issues of gender and science in a historical perspective. We will follow the shift from a discourse of women’s exclusion and marginalization to that of the social construction of sexual differences in science. We will also discuss specific case studies and try to map the field of women and gender in science, focusing especially on more recent developments and perspectives. Furthermore, students will be encouraged to reflect on their own gendered experiences in their encounters with science as students in laboratory and/or social sciences and in technological domains.

Maria Rentetzi
Assistant Professor
National Technical University of Athens
Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Physical Sciences
Zografou Campus, 15780 Zografou, Athens, Greece
Email: mrentetz@vt.edu

Rentetzi has suggested four readings to prepare the seminar discussion:

Paula Gould, "Women and the culture of university physics in late nineteenth-century Cambridge", BJHS, 30, 1997, 127-149.
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, "Women in the History of Science: An Ambiguous Place", Osiris, 2nd Series, Vol. 10, Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science (1995), 39-58.
Constance Areson Clark, '“You Are Here”: Missing Links, Chains of Being, and the Language of Cartoons', Isis, 100, 2009, 571–589.
Londa Schiebinger, "Maria Winkelmann at the Berlin Academy: A Turning Point for Women in Science", Isis, 78, 1987, 174-200.

And she asks the students to form two groups: readers of (Kohlstedt+Gould) and readers of (Clark+Schiebinger).