Women engineers have been in the public limelight for decades, yet we have surprisingly little historically grounded understanding of the patterns of employment and education of women in this field. Most studies are either policy papers or limited to statistical analyses. Moreover, the scant historical research so far available emphasizes the individual, single and unique character of those women working in engineering, often using anecdotal evidence but ignoring larger issues like the patterns of the labour market and educational institutions.
Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges offers answers to the question why women engineers have required special permits to pass through the male guarded gates of engineering and examines how they have managed this. It explores the differences and similarities between women engineers in nine countries from a gender point of view. Through case studies the book considers the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion of women engineers.

Women engineers have been in the public limelight for decades, yet we have surprisingly little historically grounded understanding of the patterns of employment and education of women in this field. Most studies are either policy papers or limited to statistical analyses. Moreover, the scant historical research so far available emphasizes the individual, single and unique character of those women working in engineering, often using anecdotal evidence but ignoring larger issues like the patterns of the labour market and educational institutions.
Richly illustrated, "Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges" offers answers to the question why women engineers have required special permits to pass through the male guarded gates of engineering and examines how they have managed this. It explores the differences and similarities between women engineers in nine countries from a gender point of view. Through case studies the book considers the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion of women engineers f

This book examines the practices of contesting evidence in democratically constituted knowledge societies. It provides a multifaceted view of the processes and conditions of evidence criticism and how they determine the dynamics of de- and re-stabilization of evidence.

The kitchen as political symbol and material reality in the cold war years. Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev's famous "kitchen debate" in 1958 involved more than the virtues of American appliances. Both Nixon and Khrushchev recognized the political symbolism of the modern kitchen; the kind of technological innovation represented in this everyday context spoke to the political system that produced it. The kitchen connects the "big" politics of politicians and statesmen to the "small" politics of users and interest groups. Cold War Kitchen looks at the kitchen as material object and symbol, considering the politics and the practices of one of the most famous technological icons of the twentieth century. Defining the kitchen as a complex technological artifact as important as computers, cars, and nuclear missiles, the book examines the ways in which a range of social actors in Europe shaped the kitchen as both ideological construct and material practice. These actors-from manufacturers and modernist architects to housing reformers and feminists-constructed and domesticated the technological innovations of the postwar kitchen. The home became a "mediation junction" in which women users and others felt free to advise producers from the consumer's point of view. In essays illustrated by striking period photographs, the contributors to Cold War Kitchen consider such topics as Soviet consumers' ambivalent responses to the American dream kitchen argued over by Nixon and Khrushchev; the Frankfurter Kuche, a European modernist kitchen of the interwar period (and its export to Turkey when its designer fled the Nazis); and the British state-subsidized kitchen design so innovative that it was mistaken for a luxury American product. The concluding essays challenge the received wisdom of past interpretations of the kitchen debate.

Abundant, salutary, problematic--energy makes history. As a symbol, resource, and consumer good, it shapes technologies, politics, societies, and cultural world views. Focusing on a range of energy types, from electricity and oil to bioenergy, this volume analyzes the social, cultural, and political concepts and discourses of energy and their implementation and materialization within technical systems, applications, media representations, and consumer practice. By examining and connecting production, mediation, and consumption aspects from an international and interdisciplinary perspective, the book offers an innovative view on how energy is imagined, discussed, staged, and used.

Homo faber und homo ludens haben bisher kaum miteinander gearbeitet, geschweige denn gespielt. Das zu andern ist Anliegen dieses Buches. Welche Bedeutung hat Technik fur das Spiel? Wie pragt umgekehrt das Spiel die Technik und wie verandert sich das Verhalten von Menschen, die in unterschiedlichster Form mit Technik und mit Hilfe von Technik spielen? Welche Folgen hat das Spiel fur die Technikakzeptanz und Prozesse der Technikaneignung? Diesen Fragen sind die Beitrage des disziplinubergreifenden Sammelbandes gewidmet. Das Thema Technik und Spiel wird aus der Sicht der Philosophie, Kulturwissenschaft, Soziologie, Sportwissenschaft und Geschichte analysiert, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf technikhistorischen Beitragen liegt.