As a robust area for investigating the production of scientific knowledge, the geography of science has been dominated by places like the field, laboratory, marine station, museum, and civic lecture hall. But scientists among these diverse sites uniformly must retire to one common place: the home. How might our accounting of the geography of knowledge-production shift when we add this fundamental institution to the work-lives of scientists? In what ways did the home provide spatial, material, and social resources for the pursuit of science, and how was “homemade science” produced in perhaps distinctive and yet replicable ways? How might the home have spawned distinctive gender meanings and dynamics in knowledge-production? What were the statuses of domestic sites within broader geographies of science?

In this symposium, speakers have been invited to address these questions by examining the status of the domestic production of science in a range of time periods, locations, disciplines, and physical configurations. Individual presentations will pay particular attention to how the gendered meanings and dynamics of scientific work assumed particular forms within domestic settings, and what those forms entailed for scientific outcomes. A commentator for the symposium, as a whole, will draw lessons from the individual cases to suggest how, collectively, the contributions push our historical understanding of the geography of gendered knowledge production.