Only very few social scientists, having outgrown their historical context, are canonised as classics or even marginally remembered for their academic work in the modern institutions and organisations of the discipline. Yet those whose work and impact remain alive have a great influence, not least on the sociological present.
For this reason, theoretical and empirical questions such as those concerning the selection decisions or the selection processes of works and persons, especially regarding the criteria for the productive processes of remembering and forgetting, as well as the resulting consequences, are of great importance. To what extent do historical and current social structures of power and domination determine these processes, to what extent do they shape and limit the knowledge of a science? How do social scientists justify their selection criteria for bodies of knowledge to be preserved and how are these theoretically founded? Could there be 'neutral' criteria at all and how would one arrive at them? Can the 'neutral scientific discourse' possibly itself be part of repression mechanisms and promote discrimination or marginalisation? And how does all this play out in the current work of sociologists, how is this work and how are current institutions and organisations influenced by it? We want to approach these questions from an intersectional perspective using the example of women in the history of sociology.
The aim of this section conference is to deal with the above-mentioned problems using the example of women in the social sciences, their individual as well as collective scientific biographies from the (forgotten) history of the social sciences. Our aim is to (re)bring to light the achievements and merits of women scholars, as well as to pose the theoretical and empirical question about their relevance and topicality. We want to ask whether there are works, approaches and perspectives that - for whatever reason - have been forgotten, but whose re-reading is essential for today's discipline, and to discuss them in terms of content, i.e., to consciously dedicate ourselves to these forgotten contents once again in a critical reflection from the current perspective. This includes the analytical question of the practices, institutions, thought patterns, fields of knowledge and power that have caused and legitimized the (previous) forgetting, as well as the methodological question of research strategies to be able to 're-find' and 'salvage' forgotten knowledge stocks in history.