Research on the history of gender in science, technology, and medicine has transformed views on what science, technology, and medicine are, where they are done, and who counts as a practitioner. Challenging the bifurcated categories of popular versus professional, domestic versus public, inside versus outside science, two Department II projects in this area have brought to the fore households and offices, kitchens and laboratories, private rooms and public institutions to uncover previously unrecognized actors and forms of knowledge-making. Beyond the Academy (2010–2013) utilized the category of gender to recast the sites of knowledge production; Working With Paper (2015–2018), organized in cooperation with the Minerva Research Group Reading and Writing Nature in Early Modern Europe, analyzed entanglements of epistemic practices in everyday life.
An ongoing gender and science reading group open to scholars across the institute cross-fertilized conversations within and beyond the working groups.
