The IUCHPP has sponsored the participation of early-career scholars in two symposia at the Edinburgh meeting, comprising a total of 5 sessions. Learn more about the sessions.

Shifting perspectives: diversity, geographies, and possibilities in the physical sciences

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Across the past two centuries, the physical sciences underwent profound social, cultural, and epistemic transformations that reshaped who participated in research, how work was organized, and which narratives became canonical. Recent scholarship has incorporated a diversity of actors, geographies, and materialities, opening up new methodologies and questions. These directions have pluralized the history of the physical sciences.
This symposium examines these shifts through diverse lenses: emotions, representation and visibility, scientific communities, and the role of communication. The symposium is divided into two panels: the first focuses more on the cultural level, and the second on the historiographic level of debate. Several contributions explore marginalized or overlooked actors. Historical analyses recover gender in US immigration programs and map the educational trajectories and institutional networks that supported women physicists. Other work traces how female physicists and astronomers were included/excluded in canonical historiographies, revealing how gendered assumptions informed narratives of progress. Communication infrastructures emerged as a critical site: librarians built the preprint systems that connected global physics communities. Changing ideals of “fun” in scientific life illuminate broader shifts toward neoliberal values of authenticity and self-realization, while reflections on diversity and social markers show how gender, race, nationality, and class shape epistemic practices. Studies of European fusion research and contemporary small-scale scientific practices further demonstrate how disciplinary, national, and institutional diversity must be negotiated to build scientific communities and challenge established narratives.
The symposium's perspectives argue for a more inclusive, critically reflective history of the physical sciences: one attentive to diversity, invisible labor, and the social conditions that structure knowledge production.

Session Organizers

Joanna Behrman, University of Copenhagen

Gisela Mateos, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Barbara Hof, University of Lausanne

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Shifting Perspectives on Histories of Gravity and Mass 

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Investigations of gravity and mass have continually reshaped the methods, boundaries, and ambitions of physical inquiry. From classical gravitation to general relativity, from unified field theories to quantum gravity, the pursuit of these problems has transformed both the substance and the structure of physics. At the same time, historians of science have begun to re-examine how these transformations have been narrated, questioning canonical periodizations, highlighting neglected contexts, and revealing theplural trajectories through which research on gravity and mass has developed. This symposium explore how work on gravity and mass has reflected and driven changes in modern physics. Its contributions reassess established historiographies, challenge conventional narratives, and highlight the diverse intellectual, material, and institutional settings in which these lines of inquiry have evolved.

Session Organizers:

Jean-Philippe Martinez, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)

Bernadette Lessel, University of Bonn 

Robert van Leeuwen, University of Amsterdam

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