Amelia Bonea (Heidelberg) and Irina Nastasa-Matei (Bucharest)

Venue: virtual space, via Heidelberg
Time: 07.-08.05.2021
Proposals by: 15.01.2021

The 20th century has often been hailed as a period when women became important in science, but their participation in scientific inquiry and practice often remains buried, quite literally, in the footnotes of specialist publications and studies of the history of science. Even today, national statistics about women in science are not always easily available. The data that does exist suggests there is significant regional and cultural variation in how women engage with science globally.

Recent UNESCO surveys, for example, point to a contrast between the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, where almost half of the researchers employed in science are female, and East, South and West Asia, where that proportion drops significantly to 23 percent or less. Similarly, in Eastern European countries female researchers tend to be better represented in science fields than their Western European counterparts.

Perhaps ironically, that relationship is reversed when we turn our attention to studies of the history of science in the twentieth century: the scientific pursuits of women in Western contexts have consistently enjoyed more visibility than those in regions like Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe. The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science (2000) is emblematic of these trends, listing as it does a mere 17 scientists from India, China and Japan, as opposed to more than 500 from Great Britain, and featuring entries up to the 1950s, a period that roughly overlaps with decolonization in Asia.

This two-day virtual conference, accompanied by a roundtable discussion, brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to address two main, interrelated questions:

• How did women contribute to the making and communication of scientific knowledge in the 2oth century?
• How do we study the history of women in science during this period? Read more and source … (Web)

Ruth Leiserowitz (German Historical Institute Warsaw) and Gintare Malinauskaite (Branch Office Vilnius of the German Historical Institute Warsaw) in cooperation with the Thomas Mann Cultural Centre and the Max Weber Stiftung (Web)

Venue: Neringa, Lithuania
Time: 26.-27.05.2021
Proposals by: 21.12.2020

Summer is the time of year that is marked by specific characteristics such as sunshine, warmth, and growth, and because of all this, it has always had a special place in culture and society. The beginning and the end of the summer was and still is partly connected with certain rituals. It should be noted that summer in life has always been a moment of freedom, looseness, and possibly relaxation in personal experience. The summer palaces of the monarchs bear witness to this. But it can also be seen in rural and urban cultures of the 19th century.

With the advent of holiday travel, another special ritualization of summer began, which of course only included certain strata of the population and also focused on certain landscapes, such as the sea coasts. Summer could mean not only working less, taking on other jobs or seasonal work but also going to war. For instance, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 or both World Wars started in the summers of 1914 and 1939.

The study of summer and its holidays could be well situated within the field of leisure studies. Social historian John Walton saw leisure as “an expression of class identity and culture under attack from the repressive and manipulative forces of middle-class authority.” According to him, this simplified dichotomy between “class expression” and “social control” remains a valuable component while analyzing this phenomenon and allows connecting the study of holidays with other topics in modern social history. Read more and source … (Web)