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Abstract:
Narratives often serve as a means of co-constructing the identities of both the speaker and listeners. Narratives can serve a homeostatic function by reinforcing a community's hierarchical (sometimes hegemonious) social structure, or they can serve a transformative, or possibly revolutionary, function by presenting allegorical examples in which a social order is overthrown and a new order is established. In physics conferences, the narratives most often told are of the type of "lone hero" story described by Johnstone (1993) as a "male narrative." The heroes are usually the narrator's thesis advisor, or one of the "icons" of the physics community, mostly male. Such stories can serve the unconscious purpose of maintaining the community sense of hierarchy or "cosmology."
The usefulness for physicists, and particularly for physics educators, in examining the power of narratives is to understand the psychological role that our “hero stories” play in shaping students’ attitudes towards themselves as potential members of the physics community. With respect to the gender bias in physics, feminist scholars of science have suggested that the problem is an embedded, historical, cultural perception, both within the physics community and within society in general, that “real” women simply are not physicists. A first step towards redressing this problem would be to foreground those apocryphal stories that have been excluded from our canon, namely the discoveries and theoretical contributions of women who have made seminal contributions to our knowledge base, such as Emmy Noether.
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