The essays in this special issue of Centaurus examine overlooked agents and sites of knowledge production beyond the academy and venues of industry- and government-sponsored research. By using gender as a category of analysis, they uncover scientific practices taking place in locations such as the kitchen, the nursery, and the storefront. Because of historical gendered patterns of exclusion and culturally derived sensibilities, the authors in this volume find that significant contributions to science were made in unexpected places and that these (...) were often made by women. The shift in focus to these different sites and different actors broadens the spectrum of what counts as science and where science happens. That is, in moving beyond the parameters of formal academic structures, this special issue seeks to recast the ways in which the production of science itself is defined and to engage readers in the redesign of the boundaries of our discipline. (shrink)

Historians have given much attention to museums and exhibitions as sites for the production and communication of knowledge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But few studies have analysed how the activity and participation of visitors was designed and promoted at such locations. Using Francis Galton's Anthropometric Laboratory at the International Health Exhibition in London 1884 as the empirical focal point, this paper explores a new mode of involving exhibition audiences in the late nineteenth century. Its particular form of (...) address is characterized by an ambition to transform the visitors' self-understanding by engaging them with various techniques of scientific observation and representation of social issues. By analysing the didactics of this particular project, I argue that the observational ideal of ‘mechanical objectivity’ and associated modes of representation in this instance became an integrated part of a political vision of self-observation and self-reformation. Thus the exhibit and related projects by Galton not only underpinned a theoretical lesson, but also were part of an effort to extend a complex set of practices among the general public. (shrink)

ArgumentBy the late nineteenth century, science pedagogues and academicians became involved in a vast movement to popularize science throughout the Russian empire. With the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, many now found the new Marxist state a willing supporter of their goals of spreading science to an under-educated public. In the Stalin era, Soviet state officials believed that the spread of science and technology had to coalesce with the Communist Party's utilitarian goals and needs to revive the industrial sector (...) of the economy. This resulted in a new Stalinist technologically oriented popularization campaign. In the Khrushchev era (1953–64), Soviet politicians became increasingly more aware of the competitive power of Soviet technology in the global arena and developed extensive campaigns to publicize Soviet feats for a broad domestic and foreign public audience. This was particularly true for topics such as the space program and big technologies such as nuclear power. (shrink)

In 1854 the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley pointed to a significant change in the way that reviewers were treating books that endorsed deeply flawed scientific theories. In the past, “when a book had been shown to be a mass of pretentious nonsense,” it “quietly sunk into its proper limbo. But these days appear, unhappily, to have gone by.” Due to the “utter ignorance of the public mind as to the methods of science and the criterion of truth,” scientists were now (...) forced to review such books in order to expose their deficiencies (Huxley 1903, 1). Huxley’s observation indicates how the development of a mass reading audience in mid-nineteenth century Britain transformed the very nature of scientific controversy. Scientists were compelled to debate the validity of theories in new public sites, not just in exclusive scientific societies or in specialized scientific journals with limited circulation. It was during the nineteenth century that public controversy—not limited to science alone—became possible for the first time. In this short piece I will discuss how the “communications revolution” produced a public space for the debate over evolutionary theory in mid-nineteenth century Britain. I will focus on periodicals as one of those public spaces in which the debate took place.1 As Huxley found, attempting to resolve a scientific controversy in the general periodical press could be a risky venture. Although a non-specialized journal could provide the public space necessary for reaching the reading audience, maintaining scientific authority in such a site was somewhat problematic. (shrink)

Science in film, and usual equivalents such asscience on filmorscience on screen, refer to the cinematographic representation, staging, and enactment of actors, information, and processes involved in any aspect or dimension of science and its history. Of course, boundaries are blurry, and films shot as research tools or documentation also display science on screen. Nonetheless, they generally count asscientific film, andscience inandon filmorscreentend to designate productions whose purpose is entertainment and education. Moreover, these two purposes are often combined, and inherently (...) concern empirical, methodological, and conceptual challenges associated withpopularization,science communication, and thepublic understanding of science. It is in these areas that the notion of thedeficit modelemerged to designate a point of view and a mode of understanding, as well as a set of practical and theoretical problems about the relationship between science and the public. (shrink)

This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of (...) children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge. (shrink)

Today, many pregnancy guides mention a nesting instinct. According to this, pregnant women would be seized by an urge to create the right environment for their child, for example to buy baby equipment or clean the apartment. The concept of the nesting instinct forms a specific configuration of knowledge: While it is widespread in the popular field, it occupies a marginal position in the scientific field. In this paper, I will investigate the historical epistemology of this form of knowledge. In (...) so doing, the following questions are addressed: How did the knowledge about a nesting instinct during pregnancy form? How was the nest as a specific natural-anthropogenic environment constructed? And to what extent do notions of gender and environment interact here? To answer these questions, the study takes the perspective of a history of knowledge in transit, in the longue durée from the nineteenth century to the present. The investigation reveals a gradual feminization of the concept of environment in the knowledge of the nesting instinct. Whereas in the nineteenth century it was often considered a male behavioral pattern and the nest was an analogy to the house, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the instinct transformed into a primarily female characteristic, with the nest representing the interior of the home. A decisive condition for this circulation of knowledge was that the nest became a ‘metaphorical thing’. As such, the nest did not simply lead to naturalization, but denoted a natural-social in-between space that increasingly became the goal of female care work. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn heutigen Schwangerschaftsratgebern ist oft von einem Nestbauinstinkt zu lesen. Demnach würden Schwangere von einem Trieb ergriffen, die passende Umwelt für ihr Kind zu gestalten, also Babyausstattung zu kaufen oder die Wohnung zu putzen. Dabei bildet das Konzept des Nestbauinstinkts eine spezifische Wissenskonfiguration: Während es im populären Bereich verbreitet ist, nimmt es im wissenschaftlichen Bereich eine marginale Position ein. Im vorliegenden Beitrag soll der historischen Epistemologie dieser Wissensform nachgegangen werden. Im Vordergrund stehen folgende Fragen: Wie formierte sich das Wissen um (...) einen Nestbauinstinkt in der Schwangerschaft? Auf welche Weise wurde das Nest als spezifische natural-anthropogene Umwelt hergestellt? Und inwiefern interagieren hier Vorstellungen von Geschlecht und Umwelt? Dazu nimmt die wissensgeschichtliche Analyse die Perspektive einer longue durée vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute ein. Die Untersuchung ergibt eine graduelle Feminisierung des Umweltkonzepts im Wissen des Nestbauinstinkts. Während er im 19. Jahrhundert oft als männliches Verhaltensmuster galt und das Nest ein Analogon zum Wohnhaus bildete, transformierte sich der Instinkt in den ersten Jahrzehnten des 20. Jahrhunderts zu einer primär weiblichen Eigenschaft, bei der das Nest für den Innenraum des Zuhauses stand. Dabei zirkulierte das Wissen zwischen verschiedenen Bereichen, wofür eine maßgebliche Bedingung war, dass sich das Nest zum ‚metaphorischen Ding‘ wandelte. Als solches führte das Nest nicht einfach zu einer Naturalisierung, sondern bezeichnete einen familiären natural-sozialen Zwischenraum, der zunehmend zum Ziel weiblich konnotierter Sorge-Arbeit wurde. (shrink)

This article will investigate the ways in which Polish illustrated press contributed to communicating and reporting the work of Polish émigré naturalists working in Latin America to the Polish general public living in the Prussian, Russian and Austrian partitions of the Polish‐Lithuanian Commonwealth 1844–1885. It examines the ways in which illustrations were used to shape the public's opinion about the significance of these migrants’ scientific achievements. The Polish illustrated press, its authors and editors were instrumental in shaping the public's perceptions (...) of the reach of Polish scientists, and exploring their impact on broader scientific debates, thereby situating Polish people and their work in a global context. The didactic and opinion‐making role of the illustrated press was highly influential among Polish audiences during this period, at a time when the survival of Polish identity, culture, language, and education was uncertain. Illustrated weeklies were one of the vectors through which high science was made accessible to the Polish public. A study of pictures in Polish illustrated press will help to explain how they contributed towards shaping the images in the public eye of naturalists’ scientific work, and discourses about science and its actors more broadly. (shrink)

ArgumentThe historiography of botanical maps has mainly concentrated on their alleged “golden age,” on maps drawn by famous first-generation plant geographers. This article instead describes botanical maps after the age of discovery, and detects both a quantitative explosion and qualitative modification in the late nineteenth century. By spotlighting the case of the plant geographer Oscar Drude (1852–1933), I argue that the dynamics of botanical mappings were closely linked to a specific milieu of knowledge production: the visual culture of Imperial Germany. (...) The scientific upgrading of maps was stimulated by a prospering commercial cartographical market as well as a widespread practice of mediating between professionals and amateurs via maps in the public sphere. In transferring skills and practices from these “popular” fields of knowledge to scientific domains, botanists like Oscar Drude established maps as an indispensable element of botanical observation. This wholesale dissemination of botanical maps had thus a formative influence on collective perception – the botanist's “period eye” – regarding plant distribution. (shrink)

ArgumentThe history of Italian “popular science” publishing from the 1860s to the 1930s provides the context to explore three phenomena: the building of a scientific community, the entering of women into higher education, and (male) scientists’ reaction to women in science. The careers of Evangelina Bottero (1859–1950) and Carolina Magistrelli (1857–1939), science writers and teachers in an institute of higher education, offer hints towards an understanding of those interrelated macro phenomena. The dialogue between a case study and the general context (...) in a comparative perspective will help us understand why Italian scientists, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, unlike their British colleagues, did not close the doors of the university on women. The case confirms the history of so-called popular science as a useful tool for historians of science generally and also when dealing with the awakening of a new social actor: in this case the “new woman” who, from the 1870s, was determined to take up science in a professional capacity. (shrink)