Welcome to the Disability Studies page!
The following video is a preview of our capstone project.
Transcript
(Image Description: A title slide page that states “Disability Studies at Lafayette” with the name of the group members: Rabia Demirelli, Nicole Holzapfel, and Scott Kamen. There is an animation of a person with a prosthetic leg pushing a person in a wheelchair.
After the title slide, Scott, Nicole, and Rabia appear in that order.)
Scott: Hi Everyone! I’m Scott Kamen.
Rabia: My name is Rabia Demirelli.
Nicole: And I’m Nicole Holzapfel. And we are the Disability Studies Capstone Team. This semester the three of us have been working together to study how we can better incorporate disability into engineering curriculum.
Scott: So, Nicole, why is it important we talk about this?
Nicole: So, our group has learned that a lot more people live with disabilities than we think. According to the CDC, 1 in 4 people will live with a major disability at some point in their life. And this covers a wide range of disabilities. Now, oftentimes, engineers do not incorporate disabilities into the engineering design process, but kind of add it on as an afterthought and think like “Oh, now we need to make this accessible.” So, an example of this would be like podiums and light switches. A lot of times, these are created at a certain height standard, but this may be a problem for people who may have growth disabilities where they are not able to reach these objects. Another example that we think about is curb cuts in cities. So, a curb cut allows someone who is in a wheelchair or scooter of some sort to get on to the street and back off the street and onto the sidewalk. A lot of lower income communities do not include curb cuts or the sidewalks are so broken that they are not able to use them. And this puts people in wheelchairs at a disadvantage because then they are not really able to navigate the city because of how unwalkable it is. So our group is studying how we can better incorporate these issues into the engineering design process and how engineers can kind of put on a different set of goggles and think about how a lot of people with disabilities may be affected by certain inventions.
So, Rabia, can you tell us a bit about what you’ve seen that other institutions are doing in this area?
Rabia: Sure! There are two model institutions that we can, as Lafayette, learn from in terms of disability studies. Olin College of Engineering as a new engineering school has an exemplary disability services office. On top of working with [the] disabled community one-on-one, they also aim to teach the whole Olin community in terms of disability and access rights, which we think is exemplary. And then, we also focused on the University of Washington which has a human centered design engineering department, which we think Lafayette can learn a lot from.
So Scott, what does disability studies look like at Lafayette?
Scott: Certainly. At Lafayette, we currently have various classes and research projects that come into this idea of disability studies and technology, but what the part of our project has been this semester is: “How do we move this forward? How do we connect these different projects together? And what recommendations do we have to further this research?” So through our website you’ll find not just our different audits, our different conversations on the different topics, but also recommendations on how we should move forward. So feel free, after you watch this video, to scroll through our website and take a look at the different things we have to offer.
Video Ends.
Please click here to start reading our report on the website.
Click here to access a PDF version of our report.