Ursula Martius Franklin CC OOnt FRSC (16 September 1921 – 22 July 2016) was a Canadian metallurgist, activist, research physicist, author, and educator who taught at the University of Toronto for more than 40 years.

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

"[18] Because of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, her parents tried to send their only child to school in Britain when World War II broke out, but the British refused to issue a student visa to anyone under 18.

[23] One small example of her work in this field regards what was a standing question on the nature of shiny black Chinese mirrors found in high quantities in ancient tombs.

Franklin's use of microscopic, etching, electron microprobe and x-ray fluorescence analyses produced evidence that what was thought by some to be a corrosive effect was in fact present in these ancient mirrors (and weapons) at their inception, in dark iron oxides intentionally added near the objects' surfaces.

In 1968, she and VOW national president Muriel Duckworth presented a brief to a House of Commons committee asserting that Canada and the United States had entered into military trade agreements without adequate public debate.

They argued that these commercial arrangements made it difficult for Canada to adopt independent foreign policy positions such as calling for an immediate U.S. military withdrawal from South Vietnam.

[30] Franklin was also 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.

[31] In the 1980s, Franklin participated in an organized campaign to win the right for conscientious objectors to redirect part of their income taxes from military uses to peaceful purposes.

She 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.

Franklin's trust in relying on scientific principles to navigate even daily struggles such as an environment "surrounded by jerks" characterizes the letter's cheerful closing, in which she recommends "taking field notes" and imagining oneself as an "explorer come upon a strange tribe."

[40] 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.

They have worked on reconciliation, peace research and disarmament and in many countries have won the right for conscientious objectors to perform alternative service instead of taking part in war.

The time between initial research and the deployment of weapon systems can be as long as a decade, during which the government must provide financial security and political justification for the project.

[49]Franklin points out that the technological nature of war requires states to conscript the resources needed to pay for hi-tech devices designed for destruction.

"[55] Franklin extends Mumford's argument by pointing to new global realities such as militarized economies dependent on weapons production and national borders increasingly closed to refugees.

"Any modern theology of peace," she writes, "must, I think, take into account the worldwide drift towards 'techno-fascism,' the anti-people, anti-justice form of global management and power sharing that is developing around the world.

Franklin contends that the new economic warlords or "marketeers" aim, for example, to transform "the ill health or misery of our neighbours into investment opportunities for the next round of capitalism.

This language includes such terms as stakeholders, users, health-care providers and consumers of education to refer to teachers and students, doctors, nurses, patients and communities.

"[62] Finally, Franklin is a strong supporter of citizen politics, a civic movement which focuses on practical solutions to common problems—everything from the absence of peace to homelessness and local traffic congestion.

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

"[65] The movement also tries to defend communities against those intent, in Franklin's words, on "turning the globe into one giant commercial resource base, while denying a decent and appropriate habitat to many of the world's citizens.

Chinese bronze casting before 1200 BC for example, required a tightly controlled and closely supervised production process as well as a strict division of labour.

Professor Heather Menzies, an admirer of 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.

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

Female operators helped introduce the telephone only to be replaced by automated switchboards after the technology had been successfully established while secretaries struggled to make the early mechanical typewriters function properly, but ended up performing fragmented and increasingly meaningless tasks.

[92] "The dreams of flight, of fast private transportation, of instant communication across continents, and of helpful machines, all stress liberation from hard physical labour at work or drudgery at home.

'"[98] "Silence," Franklin writes, "possesses striking similarities [to] aspects of life and community, such as unpolluted water, air, or soil, that were once taken as normal and given, but have become special and precious in technologically mediated environments.

"I think that if any one of you attended a Quaker meeting, particularly on a regular basis," she told a 1993 conference on acoustic ecology, "you would find that suddenly, out of the silence, someone will speak about something that had just entered your mind.

[109] The collection includes correspondence with colleagues, family, friends and activists as well as copies of over 575 pages of surveillance of Franklin by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.