ABSTRACT
An academic genealogy displays relationships between scientific researchers according to mentoring and training relationships, such as the relationship between dissertation advisor and advisee. Since the early 2000s, scores of field-specific genealogical databases have appeared online, many represented through the branching imagery of the “family tree.” This chapter provides a brief introduction to these technological objects, describing the connections between family trees, pedigree charts, and other Eurocentric, heteropatriarchal kinship records. The chapter suggests that contemporary academic genealogical databases, by invoking such kinship frameworks, inadvertently promote constrictive visions of the “legitimate” family of science, compounding existing gendered, racialized asymmetries in scientific participation.
