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A collection of publications resulting from research, events, and initiatives held at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology.
For active calls for papers, see Events + News. For past newsletter issues, visit our Newsletter Archives.
What Would Ursula Franklin Say?
Edited by Kanishka Sikri, Katie Mackinnon & Leslie Regan Shade
Humanities Commons (June 2022)
This essay series is based on our 2019/22 Reprising the Real World of Technology Working Group. The WG examined the intellectual legacy of Dr. Ursula Franklin, first woman University Professor at the University of Toronto, and her pioneering feminist/person-centred perspectives on technology, notably derived from her CBC Massey Lecture series, The Real World of Technology (1989). The WG was particularly keen to examine how the themes and concerns Franklin addressed throughout her career map onto contemporary scholarly endeavours at the University of Toronto surrounding technology and society.
FULL TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: What Would Ursula Franklin Say?
Katie Mackinnon, Leslie Regan Shade & Kanishka Sikri
Letter to Ursula Franklin 1
Digital Indigestion, Pandemic Nightmares and Earthworms: Review of the Real World 2021
Marita Moll
Sound and Silence
Ursula Franklin, Daphne Oram, and the Practices of Music Technology
Hannah Brown
Listening to Ursula Franklin: Quiet as a Path to Peace
Marcia Jenneth Epstein
An Ecological Understanding of Digital Environments
Marcin Kedzior & Will Fu
Audible Oceans
John Shiga
Biosphere versus Bitsphere
The Awfulization of News: When the Real World of Technology Meets the Real World of Journalism
Jody Porter
Teaching Holistic Eco-Media: The Quadrat as Interface Between the Biosphere and the Bitsphere
Kate Maddalena
Personal Cyber-Data Literacy Plurality in Routinized-Prescriptive and Relational-Holistic Cyber-Regimes
Peter Pennefather
Prescriptive and Holistic Technologies
The Real World of AI
Mark Surman
Algorithmic Prescription: A Franklin-inspired Critique of Algorithmic Management
Yasmin McDowell
Depending on Other in the IndieWeb: Navigating Holistic and Prescriptive Building in a Decentralized Social Network
Jack Jamieson
Ursula Franklin and the Energy Transition
Brian Sutherland
Technology as Social Instruction: Ursula Franklin and the Dematerialized Fashion Marketplace
Mark Joseph O’Connell
Realities: Constructed, Extended, Vernacular and Projected
Reading Fictional Worlds of Technology with Ursula Franklin: Fail Safe and Constructed Realities
Alan Galey, Ellen Forget & Charu Sharma
Farm(hand)-to-Table
Olivia Doggett
Social Justice
Ursula Franklin and the Principled “No:” The Need for a Recognition of a Right to Conscientious Technological Objection
Jim Gerrie
Taking Shelter: Teaching and Learning in the House that Technology Built
Steven Logan
Letter to Ursula Franklin 2
Holistic Technology as Holistic Citation
Kanishka Sikri
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Research in Brief: Space Media
Article by Réka Gál, L M Wilkins, Yuxing Zhang, Marie-Pier Boucher, Tero Karppi and Jeremy Packer
in Canadian Journal of Communication Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sept 9, 2021)
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Transnational Feminisms and Digital Islamophobia
Edited by Zeinab Farokhi and Yasmin Jiwani
Special issue of Islamophobia Studies Journal (Spring 2021)
This special issue is based on the Transnational Feminism in a Time of Digital Islamophobia Symposium organized at the Centre in March 2019 by our 2018/19 Digital Islamphobia working group.
FULL TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface: The Techno-Logics of Digital Islamophobia
Sarah Sharma
Introduction: Transnational Feminism in a Time of Digital Islamophobia
Zeinab Farokhi & Yasmin Jiwani
Cyber Homo Sacer: A Criticial Analysis of Cyber Islamophobia in the Wake of the Muslim Ban
Zeinab Farokhi
The Virtual Killing of Muslims: Digital War Games, Islamophobia, and the Global War on Terror
Tanner Mirrlees & Taha Ibaid
Gendered Islamophobia in the Case of the Returning ISIS Women: A Canadian Narrative
Yasmin Jiwani
Claiming our Space: Muslim Women, Activism, and Social Media
Faiza Hirji
The Poetry of Suheir Hammad: Transnational Interventions in the Age of Islamophobia and Digital Media
Kenza Oumlil
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Sensing of the Self, Society, and the Environment
Article by Steve Mann
in IEEE Sensors (Fall 2020)
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A Manifesto for the Broken Machine
Research article by Sarah Sharma
in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies (Fall 2020)
Many McLuhans or None at All
Edited by Sarah Sharma
Special Issue of Canadian Journal of Communication (Fall 2019)
READ THE EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION + ACCESS JOURNAL
This special issue of CJC is based on the Many McLuhans Symposium at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology that celebrated and marked the designation of the Marshall McLuhan Library held at the University of Toronto and the McLuhan Archives held at the Library and Archives Canada into the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. The event was organized and sponsored by the Library Archives of Canada, The McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the Faculty of Information, and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.
FULL TABLE OF CONTENTS
Guest Editorial: Many McLuhans or None at All
Sarah Sharma
Reading over McLuhan's Shoulder
John Durham Peters
Reading McLuhan Reading Ulysses
Alan Galey
The McLuhan-Innis Field: In Search of Media Theory
Liam Cole Young
The (Black) Elephant in the Room: McLuhan and the Racial
Armond Towns
Distributed Intelligence: Silk-Weaving and the Jacquard Mechanism
Ganaele Langlois
McLuhan and Posthumanism: Extending the Techno-Animal Embrace
Jody Berland
Flash, Spirit, Plex, Stretch: A Trans-Disciplinary View of the Media Sensorium
Rhonda N. McEwen
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Transnational Feminism in a Time of Digital Islamophobia
Conference report by Zeinab Farokhi
Feminist Media Studies Journal (Fall 2019)
A conference report covering the Digital Islamophobia Working Group's event held at the Centre on March 8, 2019. The working group is in the process of turning the research from this symposium into a special issue edited by Yasmin Jiwani, Zeinab Farokhi and other members of the working group.
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Log Out! The Platform Economy and Worker Resistance
Edited by Alessandro Delfanti
Special Issue of Notes from Below (Spring 2019)
(based on his McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology LogOut Symposium held March 2018)
READ ONLINE
Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan
Edited by Sarah Sharma and Rianka Singh
Duke University Press (April 2022)
Preface: The Centre on the Margins
Sarah Sharma
Introduction: A Feminist Media Is the Message
Sarah Sharma with Rianka Singh
PART I: Retrieving McLuhan's Media
Transporting Blackness: Black Materialist Media Theory
Armond Towns
Sidewalks of Concrete and Code
Shannon Mattern
Hardwired
Nick Taylor
Textile, the Uneasy Media
Ganaele Langlois
PART II: Thinking with McLuhan: An Invitation
Dear Incubator
Sara Martel
WifeSaver: Tupperware and the Unfortunate Spoils of Containment
Brooke Erin Duffy and Jeremy Packer
“Will Miss File Misfile?” The Filing Cabinet, Automatic Memory, and Gender
Craig Robertson
Computers Made of Paper, Genders Made of Cards
Cait McKinney
Sky High: Platforms and the Feminist Politics of Visibility
Rianka Singh and Sarah Banet-Weiser
PART III: Media after McLuhan
Scanning for Black Data
A Conversation with Nasma Ahmed and Ladan Siad
3D Printing and Digital Colonialism
A Conversation with Morehshin Allahyari
Toward a Media Theory of the Digital Bundle
A Conversation with Jennifer Wemigwans
Afterword
by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
The CBC Spark Guide to Civilization, Part Four: Attention
Featuring Sarah Sharma (Dec 2020)
Description: We have been lamenting our loss of focus and blaming our short attention spans on technology for ages. But are our attention spans actually dwindling—or is it just that there are so many things clamouring for our attention all the time?
CBC Ideas: Everything at Once
Featuring Sarah Sharma (Jan 2021)
Description: Out of synch? No wonder: the pandemic clock is messing with us. Taking measure of a strange moment, with writers, sociologists, a therapist, and a mathematician.
Climate Change, COVID-19, and the Space Cabin: A Politics of Care in the Shadow of Space Colonization
by Réka Gál (McLuhan PhD Fellow)
in #9 Climate Imaginary Reader (Oct 2020)
Going to Work in Mommy's Basement
by Sarah Sharma
in Boston Review (June 2018)
Exit and the Extensions of Man
by Sarah Sharma
in Transmediale Online Journal (April 2017)
Beyond Behaviourism and Black Boxes: The Future of Media Theory
Interview with Wendy Chun, Warren Sack, and Sarah Sharma
Chapter in Affective Politics of Digital Media: Propaganda by Other Means (Routledge 2020)
Eds. Megan Boler & Elizabeth Davis