"Conference in celebration of the PhD ceremony of NOG staff member Rozemarijn van de Wal and the Farewell lecture of Prof. Mineke Bosch.
What does it mean to be a scholar? And how can we tell our own or other lives in science? There exists a rich tradition of (auto)biographical narratives written by and about scholars, but these narratives have often disregarded or barely mentioned the role of gender or any other category of in and exclusion. Biographers did that, stressing their conviction that science is beyond the social, or that ‘the mind has no sex’, no colour, no class. For a long time, when writing their autobiographies, scholars and scientists reproduced those convictions. Indeed, one of the most common autobiographical ‘acts’ or ‘performances’ by women scholars, was to fashion themselves as ‘scientists’ as opposed to ‘women’, thereby giving off the impression that gender does not play a role in the male dominated world of academia."