Planning
Program
Tuesday, March 8, 2022
- 10:00am - 4pm — Work with master and doctoral students in Nantes University
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5pm - 7pm (Amphi Pasteur, UFR Sciences et techniques) — Juliette Lancel (IHM-CHUV, Lausanne) & Isabelle Lémonon-Waxin (Cermes3)
Opening of the public symposium "History of science and knowledge, history of women and gender: conceiving and animating a space for the co-construction of knowledge" (within the framework of the research seminar of the François Viète Center and of the seminar "Pratiques, discourses et représentations de la norme : une Approche GenréE" organized by the Research Center on Identities, Nations and Interculturality)
Wednesday, March 9th, 2022 (Amphi Pasteur, UFR Sciences et techniques)
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9:30am - 9:45am — Presentation of the Cahiers François Viète (Juliette Lancel and Isabelle Lémonon-Waxin)
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9:45am -10:30am — Juliette Lancel (IHM-CHUV, Lausanne) : " Oniromancy, a feminine knowledge ?"
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tend to present women as the privileged target of the belief in dreams. But by digging a little, nothing is less sure. What would be the reason of this position ? The seventeenth century, particularly the years 1630-1660, was the beginning of a mutation regarding the belief in dreams. It became less and less socially acceptable to worry publicly about dreams. Of course, this did not mean that no one believed in them anymore. The keys to dreams - treatises on the interpretation of dreams, which constitute a genre of writing in their own right from antiquity to the present day - are precisely representative of this plurality of belief regimes.
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10:30am - 10:45am — « Géniales » 1 (Marion Le Nevet, Compagnie Les majorettes d'Azay-Le-Rideau)
10:45am - 11:00am Break
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11am - 11:45 am — Colette Le Lay (Centre François Viète, Nantes) : " Women's careers at the Paris Observatory (1908-1940) : from integration to the unbridgeable threshold of the last step "
At the beginning of the 20th century, several factors, both external (setting up of female secondary education) and internal to the institution (supervision of recruitment procedures), lead to a progressive entry of women in the corps of astronomers of the Paris Observatory. While in the previous decades, the female staff was essentially formed by auxiliaries, ways of tenure were opened. The Great War accentuated the tendency. However, some gender boundaries remained and women were denied access to the last grade, despite a form of recognition of their contribution to astronomy. This presentation will propose a beginning of analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, of the phenomenon in order to "establish a more complete historical account"[1] than that of traditional historiography. It will be organized around the three problematics of the volume: the modes of production and circulation of knowledge, the spatial inscription of practices and the gendered distribution, the "doing".
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11:45am - 12:30am — Annette Lykknes (NTNU, Trondheim): "From analytical chemistry to Big Science: Women and the Periodic System"
One of the aims of this conference is to revisit histories of knowledge and science and reinvestigate them from a gender perspective, so as to contribute new understanding about the role of women and gender in the production of knowledge and in scientific practices. The periodic system is well-placed for such a study, since traditional accounts often present its development as the achievement of one man, Dmitri Mendeleev, pinpointed to one particular time and place (Russia, 1869). While historians have challenged this genius narrative, less attention has been given to the many layers of knowledge, uncovered over centuries, that was needed to arrive at the periodic system chemists use today, and to which many women have contributed.
Furthermore, the unique place the periodic system occupies in chemistry and chemistry teaching makes it an excellent lens through which women’s contributions in chemistry overall can be viewed, as well as the question of how and why historical accounts have not mentioned women. Indeed, the history of the periodic system started with the different concepts of elements or building blocks, long before the nineteenth century, and continued long beyond the 1860s with the continued discovery of new elements and knowledge about them. In this talk, which I draw on the collective volume Women in their Element: Selected Women’s Contributions to the Periodic System, co-edited with Brigitte Van Tiggelen, I will discuss how women contributed to the system of elements, and how these stories are embedded in the historiography of chemistry and in the history of women’s strategies in science.
12:30am-2pm Lunch
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2pm - 2:45pm — Charles-François Mathis (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, IHMC) : " De la connaissance empirique au savoir scientifique : le charbon au prisme du genre
Coal is at the crossroads of two fields of knowledge, domestic knowledge and scientific study, whose distinction is largely gendered. This contribution aims to analyse the encounters between these two spheres of knowledge. It will first look at how coal is taught, especially to young women, and how it gives rise to claims of 'domestic science'. The paper will then look at the reciprocal encroachments of men in the domestic domain of coal management and of women in the scientific domain of coal knowledge.
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2h45-3pm — « Géniales » 2 (Marion Le Nevet, Compagnie Les majorettes d'Azay-Le-Rideau)
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3pm - 3:45pm — Marie Mathieu (Cermes3, Cresppa-CSU, Villejuif-Paris): "Forms, contributions and limits of commitment in the production of knowledge. Reflections from a research on the experiences of cross-border abortions "
Starting from an empirical research that aimed at informing the pathways of women leaving France to obtain an abortion because of the legal threshold included in the law concerning voluntary interruption of pregnancy, this paper sheds light on some forms, contributions and limits of the activism (militant and personal) in the different stages of the production of knowledge in social sciences: from the search for funding to the restitution of the results of the analysis. Late-term abortions embody one of the highest degrees of deviance within the continuum of birth control methods, and their over-stigmatization and social construction as private and intimate experiences make them difficult social realities for sociologists to access. If these characteristics, as well as the urgency with which the women surveyed are confronted, constitute concrete obstacles in the setting up and carrying out of an ethnographic survey, they appear to be particularly heuristic for thinking about the posture of the researchers in the different stages of their investigation as soon as they are the object of reflexive work, since they hypertrophy a set of mechanisms at work upstream of, on and downstream from most of the fields.
- 3:45pm - 4:30pm — Julianne Nyhan (Institut für Geschichte, Technische Universität Darmstadt) : " Gender History and the History of the Digital Humanities: on the Index Thomisticus c.1954-67"
Fr Roberto Busa SJ is often called the Founding Father of Digital Humanities due to his work on the Index Thomisticus project. Busa has usually been portrayed as a lone scholar; yet, the Index Thomisticus had a workforce that numbered, at its highest point, some 65 individuals, both men and women, clerics and lay people. This talk will focus on one section of that workforce: the female keypunch operators who worked from c. 1954-67, in the keypunch training school that Busa set up in Gallarate, Italy. Their work was demanding and unglamorous, but without it there could not have been an Index Thomisticus. Through oral history, archival research and translations of newly accessible primary and secondary sources, my research seeks to challenge the exclusionary terms in which the history of Digital Humanities, has often been framed. This talk will reflect on the agency of lesser-known individuals in the emergence and development of Digital Humanities and computing in the Humanities more broadly.
4h45pm-5:15pm Break
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5:15pm - 7pm — Round table "Research and activism, what dialogues are possible?"
Moderator : Juliette Lancel (IHM-CHUV, Lausanne)
Participants : Catherine Bourgain (Cermes3, Villejuif-Paris), Marc Jahjah (LS2N, Nantes), Jérôme Lamy (CESSP, EHESS, Paris), Eve Meuret-Campfort (CRESPPA-CSU, Paris)
[1] Introduction to the special issue of the Cahiers François Viète.
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