DS & E Launchpad

Parking Spots, Trains, and Ships:

Occupying Spaces in Disability Studies & Engineering

Introduction

You are about to embark on an interdisciplinary adventure. Here are terms that will serve as tools for your journey:

Fiction-science (fi-sci): an analytical framework that entails distilling a science phenomenon into a pattern, and locating the avatar of this pattern in fiction.
We will consider different types of disciplines over the course of this module. They are:
- Base discipline: the department/field that houses your course (e.g., biology, art)
- Identity discipline: the field with which you personally identify (may or may not be your major; may or may not be the base discipline)
- Parallax-enabling discipline/s: the additional field/s introduced by this module

In this module you will explore a fi-sci analogy. Your mission is to examine how the base, identity, and parallax-enabling disciplines intertwine in this analogy.

Featuring:

Fiction:

1. Jim Ferris "Poems With Disabilities" (Poem, 2011)

2. Ellen and William Craft, Running A Thousand Miles to Freedom (Memoir, 1860)

3. Herman Melville, Moby Dick: or, The Whale (Novel, 1851)

Science:

1. Survivorship Bias (Data Science)

2. Hunting Oscillation (Engineering)

3. Phase Changes of Matter (Material Sciences)

Base Discipline:

Disability Studies

Parallax-enabling discipline/s:

Engineering, Data Science, and Analytics

Created by Dr. Mark B. Kelley, Florida International University and Mia Kalogjera, University of Birmingham, Imagined by the Science & Fiction Lab. Supported and designed by FIU Online