Teaching
History of Science Laboratory: How to Organize an Exhibition on the History of Radiation Protection (Hauptseminar)
Historians of science have recognized the power of exhibitions in engaging the public in the production of knowledge. Exhibitions, however, have the potential to do something more. They make political statements; they become sites for the visualization of different social futures. For example, in 1930 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration assembled a collection of products that illustrated shortcomings in the 1906 Federal Food and Drug Act, which prohibited interstate commerce in adulterated and misbranded food and drugs. The FDA exemplified the state of affairs in the marketplace with an exhibition entitled “The American Chamber of Horrors,” which also included several radium products of the time. The exhibition shocked the public, which played a key role in reshaping drug provisions in the proposed law and in leading to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act on 25 June 1938 (Law, 2006).
This course resembles laboratory courses in the sciences where students are asked to conduct experiments. In our case and throughout the course, students will be asked to design an exhibition on the history of radiation protection. They will be provided with the required material and will have the chance to be creative and gain hands-on experiences in designing museum exhibitions.
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The Gender of Things: How Epistemic and Technological Objects Become Gendered (Hauptseminar)
Do things have gender? What an unthinkable question especially to space engineers who put astronauts on the moon; to artificial intelligence researchers who construct humanoid robots to assist humanity in saving the planet; to physicists who investigate nature inside a scientific laboratory; to surgeons who struggle to save human lives in state-of-the-art operating theaters. Yet, what seems “unthinkable” to practitioners in science, technology and medicine, has been common knowledge to scholars working in the humanities and the social sciences: things could be and are gendered. This course addresses the processes of gendering things. It is an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between gender and the material culture of technoscience, in other words, gender and contradictory cultural, economic and social values and meanings attributed to epistemic and technological objects. Focusing especially on all those things that lie on laboratory benches, engineers’ workshops and medical facilities, our goal is to expose the practices that attribute gender not only to objects but to whole disciplines as well.
During the course students will be asked to read and present specific texts in class. We will also have the chance to discuss directly with the authors of some of the readings.
The course is an advanced block seminar (Hauptseminar) and is offered for MA and advanced BA students independently of their disciplinary background.
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