Domesticities and the Sciences

Abstract

The ubiquity and yet distinctiveness of domestic sites for scientific research have attracted an unprecedented focus in recent years, especially in studies concerned with the gendering of science and the rise of citizen science movements of the late twentieth century. It is fair to say this “new” subfield has now entered a stage of maturity, even as it continues to grow and adopt new theoretical perspectives. Following an historiographical shift we might call the “domestic turn” in histories of science, “domesticities” emerges as a critical, analytical lens through which to view scientific developments in a range of historical contexts globally. The emphasis in the literature has moved from one on the “house of experiment” to one on the “laboratory of domesticity”, attending particularly to the permeability, plasticity, portability, and plurality of instances of entanglement between domesticities and science. In view of the emergence of new empirical cases and theoretical perspectives, this paper revisits the status of domesticities within histories of science to consider the current status of the historiography and to suggest even further directions for new research.

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