Lab to Hold Plenary at International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science
Science & Fiction Lab Presents:
Fi-Sci: How Fictionality
Powers SciComm
Thursday, April 11, 2:45 p.m.
University of Birmingham
Scientists have made amazing discoveries about processes and forces in nature. But some phenomena, such as time dilation, quantum entanglement, and wave-particle duality, are difficult if not impossible to conceptualize. How should we communicate the complex and counterintuitive--whether to colleagues, students, or the public? Florida International University's Science & Fiction Lab proposes an answer: let's use fiction. Fiction opens the door to confounding natural phenomena through a process of fiction-science pattern mapping, or fi-sci, for short. At its core, fi-sci is an analytical framework that runs on analogy-making. This framework’s first principle is that our capacities to perceive strange scientific phenomena can be enhanced by—may sometimes turn on—our experiences with fiction. To fi-sci, begin by distilling a scientific phenomenon into a pattern (a form, or shape), then locate the avatar of this pattern in fiction. Playfully accepting a counterintuitive situation in fiction—something we regularly do without issue—opens our conceptual pathways to a similarly-patterned process in science.
Fi-sci analogies have the potential to transform the undergraduate experience, and beyond academia, the public’s perception of science. So how do we go from theorizing about cross-disciplinary analogies to putting them to practical use? In this lightning round plenary, Lab fellows who teach across literature and STEM share how they’ve used fi-sci analogies to inspire interdisciplinary problem-solving in their courses, and explore the wider implications of leveraging the rhetorical power of fictionality to make science more accessible.
Featuring a supermultidisciplinary cast:
Dr. Rhona Trauvitch, Comparative literature
Dr. James Phelan, English
Dr. Tigran Abrahamyan, Astronomy
Dr. Prem Chapagain, Biophysics
Dr. Sabyasachi Moulik, Cellular biology & pharmacology
Dr. Anamika Prasad, Biomedical engineering; mechanical and materials engineering
Dr. Medardo Rosario, Hispanophone literature
Jeanette Smith, J.D., Religious studies
Dr. Uma Swamy, Chemistry
Respondent: Rita Carter, science writer
