CANCELED: Reprising Franklin’s Real World of Technology: Synthesis + Applying The Real World Today

Reprising The Real World of Technology: Ursula Franklin Working Group presents a unique opportunity to rethink the legacy of Ursula Franklin’s prescient contributions to conversations about technology and society. This workshop will first present a synthesis of results from two earlier workshops that draw on key concepts from Franklin’s The Real World of Technology to map the intellectual impact of Franklin’s work and to create a lit review to unpack how search engines (re)structure our relationships to libraries and to information more broadly. Then we will explore how we can apply Franklin’s work to contemporary technological issues and events, suffused within the rhetoric of ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption,’ that have very real material impacts on equity, inclusion, diversity, social justice, privacy, resilient and environmentally sound communities, and peace.

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.