070137 UE Methodological Course - History of Science and Gender History (2023S)

On the one hand history of science is an autonomously organized field of history, on the other hand it is part of other disciplines (history of medicine, for example). While for a long time a narrative of continuously growing knowledge dominated, the questions shifted more and more to the conditions of knowledge building, the institutions, their inclusions and exclusions, the possibilities and limits of knowledge, the social and historical constitution of knowledge, its (medial) mediation, the actors of science, not only the teachers, researchers and learners, but also the sponsors and impeders, etc. Gender history understood as a critical approach can revise historical narratives through a gendered perspective, reveal the conditionalities of social organization and show the changes of historical power relations. In the seminar, we will learn about different topics and issues of the history of science as gender history, from the gendered encoding of scientific knowledge and scientific epistemological processes to the gendering of the scientific persona and institutional inclusion and exclusion. We discuss the intersectionality of knowledge, science and gender with other categories of order such as race, origin, class on the basis of exemplary sources, research questions and approaches.
The aim of the seminar is to get to know a current subfield of historical research and corresponding theoretical concepts and methodological approaches.
The seminar is composed of the following parts:
- Intensive text discussion
- Presentation of a text from the seminar reading
- Research of a source example
- Development of research questions