ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Shifting Perspectives: Diversity, Geographies, and Possibilities in the Physical Sciences (no 1)

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Across the past two centuries, the physical sciences underwent profound social, cultural, and epistemic transformations that reshaped who participated in research, how work was organized, and which narratives became canonical. Recent scholarship has incorporated a diversity of actors, geographies, and materialities, opening up new methodologies and questions. These directions have pluralized the history of the physical sciences.
This symposium examines these shifts through diverse lenses: emotions, representation and visibility, scientific communities, and the role of communication. The symposium is divided into two panels: the first focuses more on the cultural level, and the second on the historiographic level of debate. Several contributions explore marginalized or overlooked actors. Historical analyses recover gender in US immigration programs and map the educational trajectories and institutional networks that supported women physicists. Other work traces how female physicists and astronomers were included/excluded in canonical historiographies, revealing how gendered assumptions informed narratives of progress. Communication infrastructures emerged as a critical site: librarians built the preprint systems that connected global physics communities. Changing ideals of “fun” in scientific life illuminate broader shifts toward neoliberal values of authenticity and self-realization, while reflections on diversity and social markers show how gender, race, nationality, and class shape epistemic practices. Studies of European fusion research and contemporary small-scale scientific practices further demonstrate how disciplinary, national, and institutional diversity must be negotiated to build scientific communities and challenge established narratives.
The symposium's perspectives argue for a more inclusive, critically reflective history of the physical sciences: one attentive to diversity, invisible labor, and the social conditions that structure knowledge production.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Barbara Hof, University of Lausanne

Individual Presentations

• Fun in Physics: From Reverence to Play in Twentieth-Century Science - Annelie Elisabeth Drakman, The Department for the History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University

• Transformations in the Historiography of Physics and Astronomy? Canonical Narratives and the Representation of Female Physicists and Astronomers (1950-1999) - Colleen Seidel, University of Wuppertal

• The Unseen Cohort: Women Scientists in the US National Interest Programs - Johannes-Geert Hagmann

• Preprints, Libraries, and the Women Who Built the Physics Communication Infrastructure in the 20th Century - Phillip Roth, RWTH Aachen University

Session Organizers

• Joanna Behrman, University of Copenhagen

• Gisela Mateos, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

• Barbara Hof, University of Lausanne