070246 SE Research Seminar - Situated Disciplines. Gender and Women's Studies in Archives (2024S)

The research seminar is the second part of a two-semester project with the aim of a joint publication in the scholarly journal Aether (https://aether.ethz.ch) which is developed for professional students' publications specifically. Participation in the methods course of the winter term 2023/24 (070137 UE) is not a prerequisite. We welcome and encourage new students to join the project.
The project deals with the emergence of gender and women's studies since the 1970s. With a focus on German-speaking countries and the USA, the project will analyze the conflict-ridden field in which new research perspectives have been opened up: In particular, the question was whether gender and women's studies should be established as a separate subject or as a thematic or methodological focus within different humanities and social science disciplines. The course is based on a corpus of interviews from the STICHWORT Archive of the Women's and Lesbian Movement in Vienna. These interviews were conducted by the Viennese sociologist Renate Retschnig who met central figures in gender and women's studies in the USA in 1995 (cf. Hacker 2008). During the seminar we examine the material with a perspective on the history of science and gender. We look at strategic and methodological considerations among the active academics, at spaces of organization and, finally, at the relationships between the feminist movement and academia. Methodological considerations regrading the (second) evaluation of interviews are another focus of the joint work.
This project seminar will serve to process the material and to reflect methodologically on the indexing in order to move from initial drafts to publishable essays (or alternatively unpublished seminar papers) in the course of the semester. Published essays can also be incorporated into a later MA thesis. Those who wish to join the project may write their own contributions, join existing projects (given mutual agreement), prepare and edit interviews for publication, research historical contexts for the general project or carry out editotrial work. The material compiled so far will be made available in Moodle.
If you have any questions, please contact Dietlind Hüchtker and/or Friedrich Cain.