Women Making STEAM: Dr. Rhona Trauvitch (Online)
Fiction-Science Pattern Mapping in Literary STEM
Monday, September 21
7:00pm - 8:00pm
Join us for our 3rd Annual Women Making STEAM lecture series, fully on Zoom. We invite local women professionals to share their impacts and research contributions in the fields of STEAM.
STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Art, and Math. This year, we are joined by a special group of women who are leaders, educators, researchers, and creators in the STEAM world. Don't miss out engaging with these brillant thinkers as they share their journey through a traditionally male-dominated industry and how their work has contributed to communities, globally.
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Fiction-Science Pattern Mapping in Literary STEM
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? Dr. Trauvitch proposes that we do so with a tool that is not an instrument like a microscope, nor a machine like a particle collider, but a rhetorical device: fiction.
Fiction opens the door to confounding natural phenomena through a process of fiction-to-science pattern mapping, or fi-sci, for short. The fi-sci model runs on analogy-making: it involves identifying commonalities between works of fiction and science processes. Fi-sci analogies suggest that our capacities to perceive strange scientific phenomena can be enhanced by—may sometimes turn on—our experiences with fiction. As a perceptual framework that spurs us to see things anew, fi-sci pattern mapping has an extraordinary potential to power students' interdisciplinary fluency and, beyond academia, galvanize science communication and accessibility.
About Dr. Rhona Trauvitch:
Rhona Trauvitch, Ph.D., is an associate teaching professor at Florida International University, specializing in cross-disciplinary analogical reasoning at the intersection of literature and STEM. Trauvitch developed the fiction→science, or fi-sci, pattern mapping model, demonstrating that fictionality has the rhetorical power to promote science accessibility and understanding; her monograph Fi-Sci: Avatars of Science in Fiction is forthcoming from the Ohio State University Press. The pedagogical application of Trauvitch’s research is led by FIU’s Science & Fiction Lab, of which she is Founding Director. She has been awarded a $150,000 Humanities Initiatives grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and a $400,000 Improving Undergraduate STEM Education grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in support of the Lab’s projects.
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Upcoming talks:
Wednesday, September 23, 6-7pm
Dr. Rebecca Clark, The Past & Future of Human-Environmental Interaction in Florida
Wednesday, September 30, 6-7pm
Dr. Katarzyna Balug, Life in a Bubble: From the Suburb to the Space Habitat
This program is made possible by the Broward Public Library Foundation.

A Service of the Broward County Board of County Commissioners.
AGE GROUP: | Tweens | Teens | New Adults | Families | Everyone | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Technology | Speaker | Online/Virtual | Discussion/Lecture | Author Events | Arts & Cultural |
Online - Broward County Library
| Mon, Oct 19 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
| Tue, Oct 20 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
| Wed, Oct 21 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
| Thu, Oct 22 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
| Fri, Oct 23 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
| Sat, Oct 24 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
| Sun, Oct 25 | 12:00AM to 11:45PM |
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