76 Facts About Ursula Franklin

Ursula Franklin was a practising Quaker and actively worked on behalf of pacifist and feminist causes.

Ursula Franklin wrote and spoke extensively about the futility of war and the connection between peace and social justice.

Ursula Franklin received numerous honours and awards, including the Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case for promoting the equality of girls and women in Canada and the Pearson Medal of Peace for her work in advancing human rights.

For Ursula Franklin, technology was much more than machines, gadgets or electronic transmitters.

Ursula Franklin distinguished between holistic technologies used by craft workers or artisans and prescriptive ones associated with a division of labour in large-scale production.

Ursula Franklin argued that the dominance of prescriptive technologies in modern society discourages critical thinking and promotes "a culture of compliance".

For some, Ursula Franklin belongs in the intellectual tradition of Harold Innis and Jacques Ellul who warn about technology's tendency to suppress freedom and endanger civilization.

Ursula Franklin Maria Martius was born in Munich, Germany on 16 September 1921.

Ursula Franklin studied chemistry and physics at Berlin University until she was expelled by the Nazis.

Ursula Franklin's parents were interned in concentration camps while Franklin herself was sent to a forced labour camp and repaired bombed buildings.

Ursula Franklin decided to study science because she went to school during a time when the teaching of history was censored.

Ursula Franklin began to look for opportunities to leave Germany after realizing there was no place there for someone fundamentally opposed to militarism and oppression.

Ursula Franklin moved to Canada after being offered the Lady Davis postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto in 1949.

Ursula Franklin then worked for 15 years as first a research fellow and then as a senior research scientist at the Ontario Research Foundation.

In 1967, Ursula Franklin became a researcher and associate professor at the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science, situated in the University of Toronto's Faculty of Engineering where she was an expert in metallurgy and materials science.

Ursula Franklin was promoted to full professor in 1973 and was given the designation of University Professor in 1984, becoming the first female professor to receive the university's highest honour.

Ursula Franklin was appointed professor emerita in 1987, a title she retained until her death.

Ursula Franklin served as director of the university's Museum Studies Program from 1987 to 1989, was named a Fellow of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in 1988, and a Senior Fellow of Massey College in 1989.

Ursula Franklin was a pioneer in the field of archaeometry, which applies modern materials analysis to archaeology.

Ursula Franklin worked for example, on the dating of prehistoric bronze, copper and ceramic artifacts.

Ursula Franklin additionally pulled from historic and literary accounts of black mirrors in Chinese literature to support these findings.

Ursula Franklin's expertise was instrumental to dating glass; she guided a study on the remains of blue glass beads in North America remaining from early trade relationships between American Indian tribes and Europe.

Ursula Franklin published more than a hundred scientific papers and contributions to books on the structure and properties of metals and alloys as well as on the history and social effects of technology.

Ursula Franklin was active in the Voice of Women, now the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, one of Canada's leading social advocacy organizations.

Ursula Franklin was part of a 1969 VOW delegation that urged the federal government to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and establish a special agency to oversee Canadian disarmament.

Ursula Franklin asserted that the freedom of conscience provision of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed this form of conscientious objection.

Ursula Franklin's paper was to be part of an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Ursula Franklin continued to have a strong association with the University of Toronto's Massey College as a continuing senior fellow and senior resident.

Many of her articles and speeches on pacifism, feminism, technology and teaching are collected in The Ursula Franklin Reader published in 2006.

Ursula Franklin is the author of The Real World of Technology which is based on her 1989 Massey Lectures broadcast on CBC Radio.

Ursula Franklin cites as an example Benston's point that the negative side effects of contraceptive pills are considered tolerable according to present medical practices that are permeated by the patriarchal bias of reductionism.

Ursula Franklin speculates that the neglect of this research area could have a political component, given its benefits to humans rather than to the military.

Ursula Franklin explains in a prelude to her 2006 collection of papers, interviews and talks that her lifelong interest in structures, in what she terms "the arrangement and interplay of the parts within a whole," has been at the root of most of her activities.

Ursula Franklin writes that the arms race is driven by a "technological imperative" which requires the creation of an enemy as a permanent social institution:.

Ursula Franklin includes fears arising for example, from economic insecurity, unemployment and the lack of adequate shelter.

Ursula Franklin argues that the end of the Cold War brought two main changes.

Ursula Franklin asserts that this new form of war is called globalization and its battlefields are global stock and currency markets.

Ursula Franklin recommends that resistance take the form of refusing to speak the language of the occupiers.

Borrowing a Quaker term, Ursula Franklin calls on citizens to engage in scrupling, the process of sitting down together to discuss and clarify common moral and political concerns.

Again and again in her writings, speeches and interviews, Ursula Franklin insists that war and its violence are not only morally wrong, but ineffective, impractical, and costly.

Ursula Franklin suggested that it would have been more effective if, instead of launching a War on Terrorism, the US had interpreted the attacks as a political earthquake instead of an act of war.

Ursula Franklin argued that social and political structures are as inherently unstable as geological ones.

Ursula Franklin asserts that militarism is the ultimate development of hierarchical social structures and threat-based systems.

For Ursula Franklin, technology is a set of practices in the "here and now" rather than an array of machines or gadgets.

Ursula Franklin asserts that various categories of technology have markedly different social and political effects.

Ursula Franklin extends the distinction between work and control-related technologies to the larger concept of holistic and prescriptive ones.

Ursula Franklin writes that holistic technologies are usually associated with craft work.

Ursula Franklin argues that in modern society, control-related and prescriptive technologies are dominant.

Ursula Franklin argues that tasks that require nurturing or caring for people, in health and education, for example, are best done holistically.

Yet such tasks are increasingly coming under the sway of prescriptive technologies based on what Ursula Franklin calls a production model.

Professor Heather Menzies, an admirer of Ursula Franklin, describes for example, how nursing tasks are performed in keeping with preset, computerized checklists which leave little discretionary time for dealing with the unexpected or talking with patients who are lonely or distressed.

Ursula Franklin rejects the idea that powerful technologies automatically determine the ways in which people live and work.

Ursula Franklin maintains that the uses of technology are not preordained, but are the result of conscious choices.

The dominant prescriptive technologies establish structures of power and control that follow what Ursula Franklin sees as male patterns of hierarchy, authoritarianism, competition and exclusion.

Ursula Franklin argues that work could be made less prescriptive in workplaces that are less rigidly hierarchical if we adopted more holistic practices based on the way women traditionally work in running households for example, or in caring for children.

Ursula Franklin asserts that powerful communications technologies have reshaped political and social realities distancing people from each other and their immediate environments.

Ursula Franklin writes they are based on images that are constructed, staged and selected to create emotional effects and the illusion of "being there" as a participant, not just as an observer.

Ursula Franklin asserts however, that one-way communications technologies reduce or eliminate reciprocity, the normal give and take of face-to-face communication.

Ursula Franklin acknowledges that no one is forced to watch television or listen to radio; people can explore other channels of communication.

For Ursula Franklin, such canned music is a manipulative technology programmed to generate predictable emotional responses and to increase private profit.

Ursula Franklin compares this destruction of silence to the British inclosure acts which fenced off the commons for private farming.

Ursula Franklin maintains that the core of the strength of silence is its openness to unplanned events.

Ursula Franklin recommends starting and ending meetings with a few minutes of silence.

In 1952, Ursula Franklin married Fred Franklin, an engineer of German Jewish ancestry who had been exposed to Quakerism while living in England, where he had been sent to boarding school to escape the Nazis in 1936 and remained until emigrating to Canada in 1948.

Ursula Franklin died on 22 July 2016 at the age of 94.

Ursula Franklin donated records documenting her personal, professional, and public life to the University of Toronto.

Ursula Franklin donated her collection of feminist and women's studies books to the UTM library.

Ursula Franklin received numerous awards and honours during her long career.

Ursula Franklin was named Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981 and a Companion of the Order in 1992.

Ursula Franklin was appointed to the Order of Ontario in 1990.

Ursula Franklin received an honorary membership in the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International for women educators in 1985.

Ursula Franklin received the 2001 Pearson Medal of Peace for her work in human rights.

Ursula Franklin has a Toronto high school named after her, Ursula Franklin Academy.

In 2004, Ursula Franklin was awarded one of Massey College's first Adrienne Clarkson Laureateships, honoring outstanding achievement in public service.

Ursula Franklin was inducted into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame in 2012.

Ursula Franklin received honorary degrees from more than a dozen Canadian universities including a Doctor of Science from Queen's University and a Doctor of Humane Letters from Mount Saint Vincent University, both awarded in 1985.