Scientific networks are often credited with bringing about institutional change and professional advancement, but less attention has been paid to their instability and occasional failures. In the 1970s optimism among academic women was high as changing US policies on sex discrimination in the workplace, including higher education, seemed to promise equity. Encouraged by colleagues, Shyamala Rajender charged the University of Minnesota with sex discrimination when it failed to consider her for a tenure-track position. The widely cited case of this chemist (...) was not, however, settled easily and involved nearly a decade of university grievance procedures and litigation that grew to a class action lawsuit. As the case gained national attention and internal resistance stiffened, the clusters of women who had been encouraging flickered, faded and sometimes regrouped. A negotiated settlement (consent decree) ended Rajender’s case, and it opened the door for hundreds of others to present their grievances regarding gender discrimination. Networks and support groups proved important but also unstable for individuals who sought equity before and during the implementation of the decree. The Rajender case thus exposes the painful, balky and inevitably contentious process of fighting discrimination. It also demonstrates the power and limits of institutions and litigation, as well as the possibilities and disappointments of informal and formal women’s networks. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article examines advertisements for potential solutions to the problem of longitude during the year following the announcement of the maximum £20,000 reward in the summer of 1714. While there have been many studies of the race to determine longitude, advertisements have not received close scrutiny. Little attention has been paid to the commoditization of longitude in the marketplace of public science sold within London's public sphere. Although books and lecture series dominated public science in eighteenth-century England, longitude ads are (...) a unique example of this phenomenon. Unlike lecturers or publishers of natural philosophical tracts who sought audiences for demonstrations or readers for books which contained accounts of nature that were not open to debate, longitude seekers were doing something different. Those who attempted to solve the problem of longitude and advertised their plans to the public sought out witnesses to validate and confirm the effectiveness of their experiments or instruments. In other words, the public sphere became the crucible of judgment for schemes of longitude. (shrink)

In 1730, the Dutch cartographer and meteorological observer Nicolaas Samuel Cruquius constructed a spectacular map of the river Merwede. Cruquius’s map is celebrated as one of the earliest to use lines of equal depth—or indeed any type of contour lines. So far, however, the secondary literature has paid no attention to why Cruquius created these lines or to the knowledge involved in his innovation. This essay makes three related points. First, Cruquius intentionally used lines representing equal depth in an entirely (...) new way: whereas earlier maps had used similar lines to represent a river’s navigability, for Cruquius they visualized river flow. Second, different technical and epistemic practices grounded the making of the map: Cruquius built on his expertise in surveying but also on practices from both natural history and mathematical physics, with which he was familiar through contacts at Leiden University and the Royal Society of London. Third, Cruquius’s case does not fit with the way work cutting across different fields of expertise is usually conceptualized. Cruquius did not just straddle different fields. Instead, he gave new meaning to lines of equal depth by integrating specific practices from different fields of expertise and omitting others; through this integration, Cruquius created a way to visualize water flows and gave shape to possible new ways of acting on the river and its environment. (shrink)