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Presents a powerful new vision of the history of science through the lens of disability studies. Disability has been a central—if unacknowledged—force in the history of science, as in the scientific disciplines. Across historical epistemology and laboratory research, disability has been “good to think with”: an object of investigation made to yield generalizable truths. Yet disability is rarely imagined to be the source of expertise, especially the kind of expertise that produces (rational, neutral, universal) scientific knowledge. This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories of taken-for-granted terms such as impairment, infirmity, epidemics, and shōgai. Some contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians. The resulting volume announces a disability history of science.

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013-2017) has given national consciousness to the problematic treatment of sexual offences in Australia’s past. Yet there has been little historical research into the policing, prosecution and punishment of those crimes. This book examines Australia’s treatment of sexual crimes in the 1950s, a decade well known for its political and social conservatism, its prudish views on morality, and its prescriptive gender roles for men and women. Fewer would know that this same decade saw soaring arrests, mounting criminal prosecutions, and intensifying public debates about how to deal with sexual offenders. Or that sexual offences on children attracted the most concentrated state attention and public concern. Sex Crimes in the Fifties uncovers this new history by drawing on transcripts of hundreds of criminal proceedings and extensive research in criminal justice archives. We examine the criminal trial itself, exploring how prosecutors, defence counsel, witnesses, juries and judges understood sexual crimes. We consider the experience of women testifying in rape trials, the prosecution of sexual crimes against children, the court’s treatment of recent immigrants, the prosecution and punishment of homosexual men, the influence of psychiatric evidence, and the increasing public debates over the ‘sex offender’. We show that the 1950s was indeed foundational to many of our contemporary beliefs about sexual crimes. This book makes a major contribution to our historical and socio-legal knowledge about sexual offences and criminal prosecution. It will be of interest to historians, criminologists, sociologists, and legal scholars as well as general readers interested in the treatment of these crimes in our past.