Paper long abstract:

The presentation discusses the relations between epistemic cultures with low symbolic capital, nursing research and gender studies. It seeks to understand how their relationship is interlinked with gendered relations of power. It draws on Bourdieu's power/knowledge framework and Gieryn's concept 'boundary work'.

Nursing research's low academic status links with the professional-vocational background, female and mature students and researchers, small size and low female voice in the academy. Gender studies's vulnerable academic status has to do with its being small size, political, interdisciplinary, single-sex and female-centred. The fields seem to share an ambivalent and gendered relation with the discipline they are organisationally often coupled with, gender studies with sociology and nursing research with medicine.

The presentation bases on rhetorical analysis of nearly 200 abstracts in scientific journals in 1984-2014. Five articulations were found typical of the relationship: 1) gender studies develop and reform nursing research tradition, 2) gender studies help to highlight the socio-political context in nursing research, 3) gender studies and social research benefit from nursing research, 4) gender studies open eyes to the subordinate position of nursing research in the academy, and 5) there is resistance toward feminism inside nursing research. The relationship between nursing research and gender studies was found to be tinged with the power of medicine that attempts to control and intervene with the relationship. The analysis also gives evidence of positive synergies that the disciplines find with each other to overcome their subordinate positions in the academic community.

Paper long abstract:

Women are highly underrepresented in engineering. The processes of generating knowledge in engineering are, thus, underpinned by a strong gender asymmetry. Available research indicates that it is absolutely necessary to know more about how professional images of the engineer are intertwined with gender ideas in order to understanding the gender-selectivity of the profession. Following our own prior research (Paulitz 2012) as well as recent studies on engineering and masculinity (cf. Gilbert 2009, Faulkner 2007, Tonso 1999), we assume the existence of multiple masculinities in engineering and, thus, diverse gendered images of the engineer.

Our field of study is today's epistemic cultures of engineering in the Austrian academic field. Empirically, our paper is based on in-depth interviews with engineering faculty of different areas within engineering such as mechanics or engineering design. This data allows for reconstructing the diverse self-conceptions of engineers, which convey different social norms (such as gender) of who is perceived as an engineer. These normative ideas are corresponding with different kinds of epistemic cultures, which have been emerging historically along the theory/practice distinction within the German engineering tradition. Thereby, we can find primarily two dominant images of the gendered engineer - namely, the 'engineering theorist' and the 'engineering generalist'.

Paper long abstract:

There is a long ongoing debate on how theories and methodologies from Science and Technology Studies can be applied to questions of cultural sociology, such as researching music and music scenes. Several scholars, such as Antoine Hennion and Tia DeNora, have succesfully shown how fruitful STS-approaches can be to study musical fields. However, the potential of gender sociological approaches within STS to analyse power asymmetries in musical fields is not yet developed. The mentioned music sociological approaches, as well as others, neglect or underestimate the role of gendered and other forms of inequalities. On the other side, those music sociological approaches that deal with power relations do not cover and thus undervalue the role of music and sound, and technological artefacts in its use.

On the basis of focused ethnography and group discussions in the Punk Rock and DIY subculture in Graz, Austria, I will show how STS approaches can be applied to study musical fields. Musical genres can be seen as a concept of knowledge and distinguished by constant processes of boundary work. In musicking practices, gendered subjects are co-constructed with music on the basis of symbolic references. In this case, a progressive anti-hegemonic masculinity clashes with aspects of the hegemonic rock-star-masculinity. This unfolds in the use of musical instruments and the description of sound.

Transferring the concept of epistemic cultures to the field of music, it can be shown how producing and applying musical knowledge are inextricably interwoven with gendered asymmetries.

Paper long abstract:

Epistemic cultures are fundamentally created and reproduced by networks. They characterize academic disciplines, as well as factors which define disciplines as well as scientific cultures and departments in higher education. These cultures define criteria for disciplinary quality. In academic engineering these criteria can be evaluated by patents and publications.

If networks are gendered and male networks are more powerful in this male domain of engineering which is the thesis of this paper These men's networks together with their gatekeepers can influence not only the career of female engineers negatively, but, define the epistemic academic cultures with the result of a tendency of inclusion of men and exclusion of women.

This is one reason to question the focus on academic qualification of researchers only. Those factors favoring success are masculine biased but, have been neglected by focusing only on the individual merit. To get successfully research funds and publications networking and playing between cooperation and competition is necessary in which women are structural discriminated.

The background of this paper is a German research project, lasting from April 2009 to March 2012, financed by the Ministry of Education and Research and the European Social Funds, which combined the expertise of two institutions, the University of Wuppertal and the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. With a qualitative methodological design (especially interviews and focus discussion groups), case studies were conducted in companies, political institutions, governmental research organizations and universities. In this paper, only results from the academic institutions will be presented.

Paper long abstract:

Genetics has promised to resolve doubts concerning human nature (including nature of sexes), which I interpret as a special way of dealing with human fears that have appeared together with development of modern science and technologies. It concerns especially fears of the interventions in natural environment and applications of the results of the research in genetics to medicine, both of which have changed the society and its values. Genetics was supposed to find causal correlations between given genes and organisms' properties, to explain the source of diseases, peculiarities of human reproduction process or even personalities and social relations. Unequivocal explanations were needed to calm us down, to reduce fears, to allow us to state that this is how we are 'by nature' made.

In this paper I use some results of my previous research of the way genetics employs the notion of gene, of the heritage of historically developed metaphors in genetics, of the methods of constructing genetically determined sex. I want to point out that oversimplified genetic definition of masculinity has established quite stable model of the phenomenon of biological sex. It has quickly become a part of common sense being able to dispel certain fears about its nature. However recent studies and feminist critiques have shown the narrow-mindedness of these views. I am going to argue that genetics provides the evidence that biological sex is more complex and complicated that it has been assumed, contrary to its promises leaving us with even more doubts and probably fears.

Paper long abstract:

I my paper I will deal with standards-based human rights monitoring instruments and how they create a gender-bias concerning human rights violations. For my dissertation I am dealing with human rights and women's rights monitoring instruments and the way they present rights violations. One thesis I have is, that the epistemic community itself inhabits and reproduces a bias within the measurement. My research question consequently is the following: do the epistemic communities of human rights monitoring create a biased viewpoint on human rights violations?

I will look at four instruments: the Cingranelli and Richards Human Rights Data Project (CIRI) which measures 15 internationally recognized human rights, the Freedom House measures of civil liberties and political rights, and the Gender Inequality Index des UNDP. Moreover I will look at two indicators of the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (socioeconomic development and equality of opportunity). These instruments all somehow include, either explicitly or implicitly, women's rights violations. I compare the women's rights situation in a handful of countries that show discrepancies between the different measurements (i.e. Uganda, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, Viet Nam and Russia). My aim is to find hints on the connection between the gendered inequalities in the epistemic cultures of this academic area and the presentation of and the communication about women's rights.