Research ideas, questions and themes
Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou (2022) 'Numbers and Narratives: Research Ideas, questions and themes',
https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/a-feminist-genealogy-of-automathographies/research-ideas-questions-and-themes
How can we think differently about the problem that well into the 21st century women are still marginalized in mathematical sciences, which cut across all scientific and technological academic disciplines in the STEM area? Women’s contribution to the development of mathematical sciences is usually researched and theorised as a sub-area in the history of sciences, ideas, scientific concepts and mathematical terms. In addition, the frames of research and analysis are often restricted within traditional biographical research presenting some women as exceptional cases, within an overall marginalised and powerless group. Moreover, although the existing body of research has broadened our understanding of women’s contribution in the history of science, it is still bounded within restricted audiences, as well as archives with fixed limits, rigid cataloguing structures, as well as dispersed documents and translations (see Tamboukou, 2022).
In recent years, ‘the archival turn’ (Moore et al., 2016) has applied concepts from the philosophy of Michel Foucault, among other theorists, to investigate the processes, procedures and apparatuses, whereby truth and knowledge are produced. The ‘archival turn’ has challenged definitions of archives as places where a document is deposited at the end of its life to be preserved, instead introducing the idea of ‘archival sensibility’ (Moore et al., 2016) as a way of approaching the archive, driven by the unpredictable richness of its documents, rather than the researcher’s or archivist’s presuppositions and speculations. This turn then, represents an opportunity to use new approaches to confront women mathematicians’ marginalization within the archive and beyond.
The project responds to the challenges of ‘the archival turn’ by developing new cultural frames of references and more nuanced research methods to take women mathematicians out of their archival hideouts and by attending to their philosophical and literary ideas and thoughts, to create a platform wherein they can be seen, heard, understood and possibly followed. In this process, it opens up new theoretical, epistemological and methodological paths in the field of gender and science by making connections with the currently bursting area of memory studies. (see Erril and Rigney 2009) Its overall aim is to initiate a process of intense memory work against a wider background within which women mathematicians figure as exceptional, albeit marginalized, and largely unknown sublects, and not as active agents, whose scientific, philosophical and literary work has had a huge impact on the cultural formations of modernity and beyond. In this context, the project highlights the importance of memory work, as a way of understanding the lasting effects of the past into the present. Its central argument is that it is essential to throw light onto the social, cultural and political practices that some women mathematicians deployed in surpassing the restrictions and limitations of their gendered position and excel in the field of mathematical sciences and beyond. It is thus on the archive of women mathematicians’ ‘ego’ documents, including autobiographies, diaries and letters, as well as on their philosophical and literary writings that this research focuses.
Taking the idea of ‘archival sensibility’ as its overarching axis, the project retraces a genealogy of women’s struggles in mathematics by focussing on 6 women mathematicians who lived and worked in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries: Émilie du Châtelet (1706-1749), Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799), Marie-Sophie Germaine (1776-1831), Mary Fairfax Somerville (1780-1872), Augusta Ada Lovelace (1815- 1852) and Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891). These 6 biographical cases are taken as ‘automathographies', a concept denoting the autobiographical desire of becoming a mathematician, which was coined by Paul Halmos (1985) in his influential book ‘I want to become a mathematician: an automathography’. My archival research has also shown that there is a Chinese woman mathematician and astronomer, Wang Zhenyi (1768-1797), who lived and worked in the 18th century and also wrote poetry and beautiful travel diaries and essays, but apart from some extracts of her poetry included in short biographical entries and literary critiques, her writings have not been translated in English, or in any other European language, so the translation of her poetry is a much anticipated project, a translation to come.
Given that the auto/biographical documents of these six women mathematicians are dispersed in different archives around the world, both physical and digital, the lens of ‘archival sensibility’ also points to the importance of rethinking and reconfiguring the relations between and among analogue and digitized archival documents and collections, particularly addressing the question of how we can incorporate the digital revolution in the various ways we write, read and understand documents that seem to be continually drawn out from their archival hideouts. Situated in the era of mass digitization, which has radically changed the way we can approach and research archival documents around the world and across different disciplines and locations, the project attempts to create new knowledge around women mathematician’s intellectual and emotional lives but also to open up new epistemological and methodological paths in archival research that can be transferred in wider areas in the interface of social sciences and humanities.
While this project brackets the six women’s contribution to the history of mathematical sciences, which has been done already from a variety of angles in the history of mathematics and sciences (see the project's website on 'the scientific archive' of all six women), it makes a broader argument about their contribution to the history of ideas, thus showing that the divide between culture and science is both flawed and unproductive. In this way the project makes connections with a wider research field that seeks to revisit, recover and highlight women's position and contribution to the cultural histories and formations of modernity and beyond. (see https://historyofwomenphilosophers.org/ )
References
Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney. 2009. Eds. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Halmos, Paul. 1985. I want to become a mathematician: an automathography. New York: Springer.
Moore Niamh, Andrea Salter, Liz Stanley and Maria Tamboukou. 2016. The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences. London: Routledge.
Tamboukou, Maria. 2022. ’Traces in the Archive: Re-imagining Sofia Kovalevskaya’, Life Writing, 19(3), 341-356, doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2020.1771672.