Posters
Featured Science with the Sisters: Contributions and Collaborations of Women in Science in the Monastic Community at the College of St. Benedict View Digital Media
Poster Session Diana Fenton
For the past 140 years, many sisters in the Order of St. Benedict have engaged in science research and science teaching. While women in general are still underrepresented in the sciences, forty to fifty years ago, the sisters were well before their time being allowed to study science in a typically male dominated world. Beyond the stereotypical role of scientists being men, women often were conflicted in a research or science career due to work pressure and family responsibilities. What is of particular interest for this study, is the sisters not only made the choice to join the monastery, but also to engage in a profession that was not widely accepted for women, science. The purpose of this case study is to examine the contributions and collaborations in science of the women in the monastic community at the College of St. Benedict. This study examines historical archives and oral histories to identify the benefits and challenges of the women as they studied science. The study examines women graduates of the College of St. Benedict who were mentored by the monastic women and how this led them to a career in science. The research questions guiding this work include: 1) What benefits and challenges existed for the sisters in the monastery to pursue science degrees? 2) What role did the sisters play in mentoring graduates of St. Benedicts High School or The College of St. Benedict to pursue degrees in science?
Religious Charities in Local Welfare Mixes: The Construction of Evangelically Inspired Solidarities in Ghent and Antwerp View Digital Media
Poster Session Lise Dheedene
Over the last decades, religious forms of solidarity have (re)emerged and adopted new, often unclear roles in already defined but rapidly changing local European welfare mixes. Building on geographical accounts of the ‘postsecular’, this paper intends to fill this lacuna by exploring the ways in which evangelical churches and Faith-Based Organisations (FBO’s) construct localized practices and discourses of solidarity in interaction with secular public authorities and public social centers. Through (visual) document analysis, interviews and participant observation in five evangelical churches and three evangelical FBO’s in the Belgian cities of Ghent and Antwerp, it particularly examines the conditions conducive for so-called postsecular learning processes and rapprochements to emerge, in which potential religious-secular boundaries are overcome through issues of sharing and redistribution. The paper concludes that for religious players to be truly involved in formal welfare systems, they need to enter into sustainable, mutually recognized structures which allow for enduring negotiations of faith differences. It also demonstrates the need to complement the geographical postsecular framework with a focus on political opportunity structures and the context-contingencies shaping them.
