The Institut d'Estudis Catalans premieres the podcast 'Pioneres del coneixement'
The Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC) has released the podcast Pioneres del coneixement. Les dones de l’IEC (Pioneers of knowledge. The women of the IEC), in collaboration with the City Council of Barcelona and the Diputació de Barcelona. The podcast can be listened to on the Spotify, iVoox and Apple Podcasts platforms and responds to the desire of the IEC’s governing team, headed by Teresa Cabré, to incorporate the gender perspective in the actions of the institution, which at the beginning of the year created the Equality Commission.
The podcast aims to give visibility to Catalan women who have done and are doing science and research, often invisible or little known, and who have been or are members of the IEC (today they represent 17% of the members). In a first phase, the aim is to show the scientific contributions and personal likeness of eighteen female academics linked to the IEC, all of them relevant in the history and present of the sciences and humanities in Catalonia, and not sufficiently known beyond their field of expertise. All of them have been or are members of one of the five sections that make up the IEC: the Philological Section, the Philosophy and Social Sciences Section, the Biological Sciences Section, the Science and Technology Section and the Historical and Archaeological Section.
Until 1978, no woman was a full member of the IEC. The first was Creu Casas i Sicart. It is precisely this biologist, an expert in bryophytes, who is the protagonist of the first episode of the podcast. In this first instalment, there are also the similarities of the historian Eva Serra, the linguist Aina Moll and the writer M. Àngels Anglada. In the following instalments, the protagonists will be Maria Teresa Ferrer, medieval historian, and Mercè Durfort, biologist, as well as the active members Teresa Cabré, philologist and current president of the IEC; Eulalia Duran; Carlota Solé; Pilar Bayer, and Carme Gràcia, among others.
The Institut d’Estudis Catalans, created in 1907 by Enric Prat de la Riba, is the academy of language, science and the humanities for the entire Catalan-speaking territory. It is an academy of academies, in which all fields of knowledge are represented through its five sections: from the pure sciences to the humanities, including technology, history, archaeology, law and economics.