Negotiating In/Visibility - by Amelia Bonea & Irina Nastasa-Matei Hardcover

About the Book

This volume documents the (in)visibility of women in science in the twentieth century.

Book Synopsis

This volume 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.

From the Back Cover

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.

Review Quotes

'Negotiating in/visibility" advances the history of women in science in two ways. It multiplies the sites at which we look for scientific work, foregrounding schools, homes and voluntary associations alongside laboratories and clinics. It also shows that the politics of visibility must be studied within networks of travel, translation and pedagogy, not only within the walls of institutions. For historians of science, technology and medicine, as well as for gender historians and STS scholars, this is a collection to assign and to argue with. It is a model of how edited volumes can extend a field's archive while sharpening its conceptual tools.'
Masha Bratishcheva, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, H-Soz-Kult

About the Author

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

Irina Nastasa-Matei is Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, University of Bucharest