Abstract

In physics, gender is both highly invisible and highly visible. On one hand, the discipline as such is often seen as completely unaffected by social structures, making gender on one level highly invisible. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of physicists are men, making gender simultaneously very visible. In this tension of the in/visibility of gender, physics students are learning to become physicists – a learning that involves both the learning of content knowledge and the constitution of a physicist identity. The focus of my PhD thesis was on the latter, on how physics students constitute identities as physicists in relation to the disciplinary culture of physics. In particular, this talk will explore how physics students can be understood as constructing the boundaries of the physicist community and identities as physicists in relation to these perceived boundaries. For example: what do physics students see as appropriate and inappropriate practices in the laboratory and how are those practices tied to a doing of gender and a doing of class; which approaches to laboratory work are seen as having/giving high status, and what does it take for a physics student to identify as a physicist?

I will conclude my talk by briefly introducing my current research project, in which I intend to explore how primary school student teachers negotiate their identities as teachers of science in the tension between ‘female’ primary teaching and ‘masculine’ science.