Background
Londa Schiebinger was born on May 13, 1952 in Lincoln, Nebraska, United States. She is a daughter of Robert Donald and Dolores Gwendolyn Schiebinger.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States
In 1974 Londa Schiebinger received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
In 1977 Londa Schiebinger obtained a Master of Arts degree from Harvard University and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1984.
(As part of his attempt to secure a place for women in sci...)
As part of his attempt to secure a place for women in scientific culture, the Cartesian François Poullain de la Barre asserted as long ago as 1673 that “the mind has no sex.” In this rich and comprehensive history of women’s contributions to the development of early modern science, Londa Schiebinger examines the shifting fortunes of male and female equality in the sphere of the intellect. Schiebinger counters the “great women” mode of history and calls attention to broader developments in scientific culture that have been obscured by time and changing circumstance. She also elucidates a larger issue: how gender structures knowledge and power.
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Has-No-Sex-Origins/dp/067457625X/?tag=2022091-20
1989
(Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar,...)
Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar, and peculiarly durable, vision of nature - one that embodied the sexual and racial tensions of that era. When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century Europeans, clothing the females in silk vestments and training them to sip tea with the modest demeanor of English matrons, while imagining the males of the species fully capable of ravishing women. Written with humor and meticulous detail, Nature’s Body draws on these and other examples to uncover the ways in which assumptions about gender, sex, and race have shaped scientific explanations of nature. Schiebinger offers a rich cultural history of science and a timely and passionate argument that science must be restructured in order to get it right.
https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Body-Gender-Making-Science/dp/081353531X/?tag=2022091-20
1993
(Has Feminism Changed Science? is at once a history of wom...)
Has Feminism Changed Science? is at once a history of women in science and a frank assessment of the role of gender in shaping scientific knowledge. Science is both a profession and a body of knowledge, and Londa Schiebinger looks at how women have fared and performed in both instances. She first considers the lives of women scientists, past and present: How many are there? What sciences do they choose - or have chosen for them? Is the professional culture of science gendered? And is there something uniquely feminine about the science women do? Schiebinger debunks the myth that women scientists - because they are women - are somehow more holistic and integrative and create more cooperative scientific communities. At the same time, she details the considerable practical difficulties that beset women in science, where domestic partnerships, children, and other demanding concerns can put women's (and increasingly men's) careers at risk.
https://www.amazon.com/Feminism-Changed-Science-Londa-Schiebinger/dp/0674005449/?tag=2022091-20
1999
(Feminism and the Body presents classic texts in feminist ...)
Feminism and the Body presents classic texts in feminist body studies. Intended for undergraduate and graduate students, the volume touches on the medical history of sexual differences, the political history of the body, the history of clothing and its cultural meanings, symbolic renderings of the body, male bodies, and the body in colonial and cross-cultural contexts.
https://www.amazon.com/Feminism-Body-Oxford-Readings/dp/0198731914/?tag=2022091-20
2000
(What useful changes has feminism brought to science? Femi...)
What useful changes has feminism brought to science? Feminists have enjoyed success in their efforts to open many fields to women as participants. But the effects of feminism have not been restricted to altering employment and professional opportunities for women. The essays in this volume explore how feminist theory has had a direct impact on research in the biological and social sciences, in medicine, and in technology, often providing the impetus for fundamentally changing the theoretical underpinnings and practices of such research. In archaeology, evidence of women's hunting activities suggested by spears found in women's graves is no longer dismissed; computer scientists have used feminist epistemologies for rethinking the human-interface problems of our growing reliance on computers. Attention to women's movements often tends to reinforce a presumption that feminism changes institutions through critique-from-without. This volume reveals the potent but not always visible transformations feminism has brought to science, technology, and medicine from within.
https://www.amazon.com/Feminism-Twentieth-Century-Science-Technology-Medicine/dp/0226120244/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(Plants seldom figure in the grand narratives of war, peac...)
Plants seldom figure in the grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life yet they are often at the center of high intrigue. In the eighteenth century, epic scientific voyages were sponsored by European imperial powers to explore the natural riches of the New World, and uncover the botanical secrets of its people. Bioprospectors brought back medicines, luxuries, and staples for their king and country. Risking their lives to discover exotic plants, these daredevil explorers joined with their sponsors to create a global culture of botany. But some secrets were unearthed only to be lost again. In this moving account of the abuses of indigenous Caribbean people and African slaves, Schiebinger describes how slave women brewed the "peacock flower" into an abortifacient, to ensure that they would bear no children into oppression. Yet, impeded by trade winds of prevailing opinion, knowledge of West Indian abortifacients never flowed into Europe. A rich history of discovery and loss, Plants and Empire explores the movement, triumph, and extinction of knowledge in the course of encounters between Europeans and the Caribbean populations.
https://www.amazon.com/Plants-Empire-Colonial-Bioprospecting-Atlantic/dp/0674025687/?tag=2022091-20
2004
(In the early modern world, botany was big science and big...)
In the early modern world, botany was big science and big business, critical to Europe's national and trade ambitions. Tracing the dynamic relationships among plants, peoples, states, and economies over the course of three centuries, this collection of essays offers a lively challenge to a historiography that has emphasized the rise of modern botany as a story of taxonomies and "pure" systems of classification. Charting a new map of botany along colonial coordinates, reaching from Europe to the New World, India, Asia, and other points on the globe, Colonial Botany explores how the study, naming, cultivation, and marketing of rare and beautiful plants resulted from and shaped European voyages, conquests, global trade, and scientific exploration.
https://www.amazon.com/Colonial-Botany-Science-Commerce-Politics/dp/0812220099/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(The prominent scholars featured in Gendered Innovations i...)
The prominent scholars featured in Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering explore how gender analysis can profoundly enhance human knowledge in the areas of science, medicine, and engineering. Where possible, they provide concrete examples of how taking gender into account has yielded new research results and sparked creativity, opening new avenues for future research. Several government granting agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health and the European Commission, now require that requests for funding address whether, and in what sense, sex and gender are relevant to the objectives and methodologies of the research proposed, yet few research scientists or engineers know how to do gender analysis. This book begins to rectify the situation by shedding light on the how and the why.
https://www.amazon.com/Gendered-Innovations-Science-Engineering-Schiebinger/dp/080475814X/?tag=2022091-20
2008
(What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ...)
What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology - the study of ignorance - provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about "how we know" to ask: Why don't we know what we don't know? The essays assembled in Agnotology show that ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge; it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Ignorance has a history and a political geography, but there are also things people don't want you to know ("Doubt is our product" is the tobacco industry slogan). Individual chapters treat examples from the realms of global climate change, military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American paleontology, theoretical archaeology, racial ignorance, and more. The goal of this volume is to better understand how and why various forms of knowing do not come to be, or have disappeared, or have become invisible.
https://www.amazon.com/Agnotology-Unmaking-Ignorance-Robert-Proctor/dp/0804759014/?tag=2022091-20
2008
(The question of gender in science and technology is pursu...)
The question of gender in science and technology is pursued by scholars from different disciplines and perspectives: historians study the lives of women scientists within the context of institutions that for centuries held women at arm’s length; sociologists uncover women’s access to the means of scientific production; biologists scrutinize how science has studied female and male bodies; cultural critics explore normative understandings of femininity and masculinity; philosophers and historians of science analyse how gender has influenced the content and methods of science and technology. Now, this new four-volume collection from Routledge enables users to make sense of the interlocking pieces of the gender, science, and technology puzzle: the history of women’s participation in science and engineering; the structure of research institutions; and the gendering of human knowledge. The volumes bring together important representative publications treating these issues from antiquity to the present, and across cultures.
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Technology-Critical-Concepts-Historical/dp/0415855608/?tag=2022091-20
2014
(In the natural course of events, humans fall sick and die...)
In the natural course of events, humans fall sick and die. The history of medicine bristles with attempts to find new and miraculous remedies, to work with and against nature to restore humans to health and well-being. In this book, Londa Schiebinger examines medicine and human experimentation in the Atlantic World, exploring the circulation of people, disease, plants, and knowledge between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. She traces the development of a colonial medical complex from the 1760s, when a robust experimental culture emerged in the British and French West Indies, to the early 1800s, when debates raged about banning the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself. Massive mortality among enslaved Africans and European planters, soldiers, and sailors fueled the search for new healing techniques. Amerindian, African, and European knowledges competed to cure diseases emerging from the collision of peoples on newly established, often poorly supplied, plantations. But not all knowledge was equal. Highlighting the violence and fear endemic to colonial struggles, Schiebinger explores aspects of African medicine that were not put to the test, such as Obeah and vodou. This book analyzes how and why specific knowledges were blocked, discredited, or held secret.
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Cures-Slaves-Medicine-Eighteenth-Century/dp/1503602915/?tag=2022091-20
2017
Londa Schiebinger was born on May 13, 1952 in Lincoln, Nebraska, United States. She is a daughter of Robert Donald and Dolores Gwendolyn Schiebinger.
In 1974 Londa Schiebinger received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In 1977 he obtained a Master of Arts degree from Harvard University and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1984.
From 1977 to 1984 Londa Schiebinger was a teaching fellow at Harvard University in the Department of History and the Committee on History and Literature. From 1984 to 1986 she served as a lecturer at Stanford University. From 1988 to 1991 she served as an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University, an associate professor of history and women's studies from 1991 to 1993, a professor of history and women Studies from 1993 to 2000, and the Edwin E. Sparks Professor of the History of Science from 2000 to 2004. From 1992 to 1993 she was a visiting associate professor at Princeton University.
From 1994 to 1995 Schieninger was a founding director of Women in the Sciences and Engineering Institute at Pennsylvania State University (PSU). From 1995 to 2004 Londa Schiebinger was a co-founder and co-director of Inter-College Program in Science, Medicine, and Technology in Culture at Pennsylvania State University. From 1996 to 1999 she was a founder and coordinator of Gender History Workshop at PSU.
From 2004 to 2010 Londa Schiebinger was a director of Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research in Stanford. From 2005 to 2006 she worked as the Jantine Tammes Chair at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In November, 2006 she was the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Distinguished Visitor at Oldenburg University.
(The question of gender in science and technology is pursu...)
2014(What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ...)
2008(The prominent scholars featured in Gendered Innovations i...)
2008(As part of his attempt to secure a place for women in sci...)
1989(Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar,...)
1993(Has Feminism Changed Science? is at once a history of wom...)
1999(What useful changes has feminism brought to science? Femi...)
2001(Plants seldom figure in the grand narratives of war, peac...)
2004(In the early modern world, botany was big science and big...)
2005(Feminism and the Body presents classic texts in feminist ...)
2000(In the natural course of events, humans fall sick and die...)
2017Londa Schiebinger is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Londa Schiebinger is married Robert Neel Proctor. They have two children: Geoffrey Robert Schiebinger and Jonathan Neel Proctor.