Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices

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Maria Rentetzi surveys the materials and experimental practices of radioactivity research in early twentieth century Vienna, focusing on radioactive materials, instruments, women's work in physics, and gendered skills. She shows how experimental cultures-scientific practices employed by gendered subjects who share a certain material and epistemic style of research-in radioactivity are constructed and reshaped by politics as well as scientists of different genders. She also explores the different ways experimental practices affect men and women in laboratory sciences. Rentetzi expands the notion of material culture to include not only instruments and objects but also materials that operated as both commodities and objects of scientific inquiry. Rentetzi tells the true story of how purified radium ended up on laboratory benches, who extracted and isolated it from tons of residues, who designed experiments and instruments for probing radium's properties, the process through which radium was carried outside of the physics laboratory and into the clinic and medical amphitheaters, how the architecture of the laboratory affected men's and women's scientific work, and how its urban setting reflected assumptions about scientific cross-disciplinary collaborations. Following the circulation of radium and the pursuit of power through strategies of partnership and collaboration, Rentetzi redraws paths of scientific exchanges and transfers the reader from scientific laboratories to hospitals and from academic to industrial sites.