Negotiating In/Visibility: Women, Science, Engineering and Medicine in the Twentieth Century - Hardcover

by Amelia Bonea (Editor), Irina Nastasa-Matei (Editor)

This volume brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to discuss how women contributed to the making, pedagogy, institutionalisation and communication of scientific knowledge in the twentieth century, and to reflect on the theoretical and methodological challenges of documenting such hidden contributions. Featuring examples from China, former Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, India, Japan, Romania, the United Kingdom and the United States, the contributors discuss women's engagement with science across different institutional and non-institutional sites, ranging from the laboratory and the school to the clinic, the home and the media. The volume moves beyond the professional scientist model to enlarge our understanding of women's participation in twentieth-century science and document the complex combination of factors that rendered such contributions (in)visible to contemporaries and future generations.

Back Jacket

Negotiating in/visibility documents the (in)visibility of women in science in the twentieth century. It combines individual and collective portraits with discussions of institutional structures, work cultures, science and domesticity, the pedagogy of science and the gendered dimensions of science communication.
The twentieth century was a period when women started gaining access to science education and careers in unprecedented numbers. But why have they continued to be largely absent from the 'collective memory of science'? This volume seeks to investigate the politics of (in)visibility that helped relegate women to peripheral positions in the annals of twentieth-century science and understand how they negotiated their circumstances in regional and socio-political contexts that transcend the usual focus on the Western world. The chapters draw on a wide range of historical material and a multilingual archive in languages as diverse as Chinese, Czech, English, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese and Romanian. They combine individual and collective portraits of women in science with discussions of institutional structures, work and associational cultures, science and domesticity, the pedagogy of science and science communication.
Moving beyond simply theorizing (in)visibility, the book offers strategies for mainstreaming the history of women in science and rethinking our definitions of science, scientists and scientific labour to write more inclusive histories of knowledge making, pedagogy and communication.

Author Biography

Amelia Bonea is Lecturer in Global History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester