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Young Belgian scientists – men and women – ready for their journey to the United States, 1920

Brussels, 16 June 2015, Academy Palace, Rubens room, Hertogsstraat 1

     Belgian Science and Technology Online Resources (Bestor), the research program Scientific Personae in Cultural Encounters and the University of Leuven’s  Research Group Cultural History since 1750 are jointly organizing the international workshop “Heroic journeys? Networks of women scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century”.  

 

     Scientists need networks for the validation of their knowledge claims as well as the furthering of their careers. These scientific networks have taken on many forms. Formal and institutionalized networks have coexisted with equally important informal, even familial networks. They could be national as well as transnational. In all cases, these networks were gendered spheres: ranging from open to all, yet male-dominated to exclusively female forms of sociability.

 

     Heroic journeys? investigates the forms international scientific female networking have taken in the late nineteenth and twentieth century and how this networking provoked cultural encounters of women scientists. What role did these networks play in the journeys – both in a figurative and a more literal sense - of women scientists? Did exclusively female networks foster women’s careers, or did they rather reinforce processes of marginalization in a male dominated environment? Was international travel, an increasingly important aspect of being a scientist, enhanced by this networking?

 

     We propose to research this through the lens of scientific personae. In what way did these networks open up or close down roles and repertoires of being a scientist? Was it possible for women scientists to adapt personae that were perceived masculine, such as the heroic scientist? Or were their options confined to different, more feminine models?

 

     Papers presented at this workshop will discuss multiple disciplinary contexts through both formal, institutionalized networks and informal networks created by individual researchers and research groups. The International Federation of University Women (IFUW) is particularly interesting in this context because it worked on both these levels. The organization had a well-organized fellowship program as well as an infrastructure (conferences, clubhouses) that promoted women scientists informal networks and professional friendships. The papers presented combine studies of the funding agencies that promoted international exchanges with biographical studies that demonstrate the significance of these exchanges for individual women scientists, their careers and their ways of constructing scientific personae.

Programme

09:30    Lyvia Diser and Geert Vanpaemel, (Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts) – Opening lecture

 

10:00    Maria Rentetzi (National Technical University of Athens) – Keynote lecture

 

11:00    Coffee break

 

11:30    Kaat Wils and Pieter Huistra (KU Leuven) – Belgian women scientists and their travels during the Inter War Years

 

12:00    Kirsti Niiskanen (Stockholm University) – Struggle for recognition. The Swedish economist Karin Kock’s persona rejected

 

13:00    Lunch

 

14:00    Rozemarijn van de Wal (University of Groningen) – Picturing Power: Discussing the concept of persona by analyzing images of

             Eileen Power

 

14:30    Lisa Svanfeldt-Winter (Stockholm University) – The Finnish folklorist Elsa Enäjärvi-Haavio's networks in the International

             Federation of University Women and her shaping of a scientific persona in 1927-1951

 

15:00    Coffee

 

15:30    Anna Cabanel (University of Groningen) – Dual crossing: From Norway to France, then to the USA. Analysis of the radiochemist

             Ellen Gleditsch's scientific journeys? (1907-1914)

 

16:00    Marie-Elise Hunyadi (University of Geneva) – From science to politics: Study of several career trajectories of IFUW’s

             representatives at intergovernmental organisations

 

16:30    Rebecca Rogers (Paris Descartes University) – Closing remarks

 

17:00    Final discussion

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