CANCELED: Reprising Franklin’s Real World of Technology: “Hacking” the Lit Review

Reprising The Real World of Technology: Ursula Franklin Working Group presents a unique opportunity to rethink the way we conduct literature reviews, using approaches and ideas inspired by the renowned philosopher of technology, Ursula Franklin.

• Do you ever have trouble finding academic sources for a course paper or research brief?
• Do you ever wonder why popular search tools like Google can start to act like “echo chambers”?
• Are you interested in thinking more critically and engaging more deeply with the processes (and politics) involved in searching for sources?

If yes, then join us for a unique spin on the “hackathon,” aimed at HACKING THE LIT(erature) REVIEW. This workshop will be a mix of hands-on collaborative activities, and a roundtable discussion of how library search tools act as “prescriptive technologies” — shaping our results (and papers) in hidden ways. We will draw on key concepts from Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology to understand how search engines (re)structure our relationships to libraries and to information more broadly. This text will also be the topic of the preliminary “lit review” that we’ll conduct as a group, uncovering the limits and bias found within common search tools and strategies, and sharing tips and strategies for how to use them more effectively and reflexively.

Background on Reprising The Real World of Technology: the Ursula Franklin Working Group, sponsored by the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology
It has been thirty years since Ursula Franklin (first woman University Professor at the University of Toronto) delivered the 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, The Real World of Technology, and twenty years since its expanded version was published. Describing technology as practice and as a system, Franklin encouraged us to examine the social class of experts, the changing nature of community, and issues of power and control. She argued for attentiveness about how digital technologies affect relations of time and space, individual and collective responsibilities, and provided a bridge between the humanist traditions and the technological explosion that continues today. The Ursula Franklin Working Group brings together faculty and students at the University of Toronto to examine the intellectual legacy of Franklin, from her pioneering feminist/person-centered perspectives on technology, to the themes and concerns about peace, gender equality and the environment that she addressed throughout her career.