Introduction for “What Would Ursula Franklin Say?” Series: https://reprisingtherealworld.hcommons.org/wwufs-series/

Audible Oceans is a film by John Shiga with editing and graphic design by Taylor Maclean at the Centre for Communicating Knowledge in The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University. The film explores the ruins of a vast sonar network built during the Cold War by the US Navy as part of its nuclear warfare strategy. Inspired by Ursula…[Read more]

The energy sector is poised for rapid, critical growth and scaling of new technologies, where concerted efforts on the part of scientists, governments, industry and the public are of critical importance in achieving a low carbon future. Ursula Franklin’s work on sustainability with the Science Council of Canada was a formative contribution to a…[Read more]

The ‘real world of AI’ is not a fictional place or concept. There is a real world of AI that we should aspire towards, and that is within our reach. A world where the design of technology includes the practice of justice and on the enforcement of limits to power. Franklin’s work offers us a powerful lens for thinking about where we are today…[Read more]

Written in the form of a letter to Ursula Franklin, this essay sutures her theorizations of technology to citational practices. Thinking with Franklin’s desire to alter the ways we imagine technology—metaphorically and physically—and our relationships in this creation process, this letter extends citational practices as in need of a similar trans…[Read more]

During a 2014 meeting with the journalism fellows at Massey College, Ursula Franklin presciently warned against what she called the ‘awfulization’ of public discourse—a ceaseless tallying of wrongs, with no path to setting it right. Understanding, not simply awareness, is the key to creating change, she said. Reflecting on Franklin’s publish…[Read more]

Ursula Franklin encouraged all who would listen to act in ways that are socially useful and personally satisfying. Over two decades ago, in her Massey Lectures on The Real World of Technology, she warned about the unsustainability of prescriptive bitsphere technology regimes determined by precisely routinized compliance. She advocated for…[Read more]

COVID-19 necessitated the accelerated growth of a powerful and aggressive new form of fashion retail: online, device-based consumption. This online migration has radically altered modern retail, from invasive marketing to engage consumers, through virtual selection and ultimately the dematerialization of the body and understanding of the self in…[Read more]

This article, in the form of a personal letter to the departed Ursula, begins with observations on the modern world of communications dominated by digital interactions. It corroborates Franklin’s slice and dice metaphor, pointing out how the internet has changed the way individuals interact and the far-reaching social impacts of that change. It t…[Read more]

In The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin characterizes technology as an agent that structures work and the people at work, to the detriment of the latter. This raises the question: What would Ursula Franklin say about the widespread adoption of algorithmic management? While algorithmic management helps employers improve efficiency and…[Read more]

In this essay, I describe the tradition of teaching quadrat sampling methods in the environmental sciences in Ursula Franklin’s terms of the essential need for “[education] at the interface of biosphere and bitsphere.” Because field sampling requires embodied training and practice on the part of the forester or scientist, Franklin would call sampl…[Read more]

In The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin draws on the metaphor of the “house that technology has built” to illustrate the all-encompassing and pervasive environment of technology. In this paper, I take this metaphor literally by turning to our transformed houses and homes during the pandemic. By way of illustration, I draw on my exp…[Read more]

Digital environments are emerging as quasi-public spaces, but they are heavily programmed spaces and a part of a long history of enclosing the commons with psychic and social consequences. In Pacifism as a Map Dr. Ursula Franklin’s piece “Silence and the Notion of the Commons” guides us through the way Quaker meetings and other forms of silen…[Read more]

There is a growing movement to build alternatives to large, corporate web platforms. This is motivated largely by concerns that these platforms exercise too much power. In Franklin’s terms, they do so using prescriptive technologies, which limit individuals’ control for the sake of facilitating complex projects too large for any individual to man…[Read more]

For Ursula Franklin technologies are not mere neutral instruments. Technologies manifest morally relevant effects regardless of the intentions of users. These effects not only remake society and the broader natural environment, they remake us, predisposing us to certain ways of life. As a Quaker, Franklin was concerned with pursuing peace and…[Read more]

This working paper takes up Ursula Franklin’s concept of constructed reality, mentioned in her Massey Lectures, and expands upon her engagements with themes of power and technology as represented in literature, film, and other imaginative works. We consider what Ursula Franklin might have said about the power of fiction to shape our u…[Read more]

Ursula Franklin’s recognition of the importance of humanistic values in the development and use of technology was rooted in her connection to the faith community of the Society of Friends (“Quakers”), stressing pacifism, social justice, and the importance of silence as a portal to inspiration. Her respect for silence informed her keynote add…[Read more]

Whose realities are not encompassed in our current “real world” of food systems and processes? This critical, speculative design project consists of three mushroom labels that are inspired by Ursula Franklin’s four layers of reality: constructed, extended, vernacular and projected. Franklin claims that while everyone experiences each reali…[Read more]

Ursula Franklin’s concept of the “real world of technology” focuses on the ways in which technologies are not simply artifacts, but “practices” which impact all aspects of everyday life, including social relationships and work (Franklin, 1999). In this article, I discuss how the work of cultural production is linked to Franklin’s ideas about labou…[Read more]