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The McLuhan Program Launches “City as Classroom: Ideas Without Walls”

Submitted on Thursday, October 15, 2015

MEDIA ADVISORY from the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, October 15, 2015

The McLuhan Program Launches “City as Classroom: Ideas Without Walls”

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The McLuhan Monday Night Seminars are back, and more. The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the Coach House Institute, Faculty of Information, at the University of Toronto, will announce its fall 2015 rollout of seminars, workshops and special events at a special event on October 20, and media are invited to find out more over shared narratives on famed media theorist, Marshall McLuhan.

A half century ago, the late Marshall McLuhan launched the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto where he meditated, taught and held court in his famous Monday Night Seminars. Pierre Trudeau, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Margaret Atwood, Malcolm Muggeridge, Tom Wolfe, Woody Allen, and Northrop Frye are just a few of those who interacted with McLuhan at the Centre.

A new series, called “City as Classroom: Ideas Without Walls,” steps outside the university classroom walls and into the city itself as a source of inspiration, knowledge with access to remarkable people, who will meet with us to discuss the big ideas of our time.

Finally, in celebration of a half-century McLuhan legacy, and to usher in a revitalized McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology for the 21st century, the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, in partnership with the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, will celebrate the 52th Anniversary of the opening of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture & Technology (founded on October 24rd 1963 by Marshall McLuhan), by unveiling new signage.

WHO: Well known intellectuals, practitioners and raconteurs as well as city planners, academics, artists, business people, scientists, musicians and media figures will be participants, in the very Coach House where Marshall McLuhan fired our creative imagination.

Members of the McLuhan family, Michael McLuhan, Eric McLuhan, and Stephanie McLuhan, as well as the McLuhan Centenary Fellows 2015/2016, Andrew Chrystall, Paolo Granata, David Nostbakken, John Oswald, and Sandy Pearlman, will be on hand at the Launching Kick-off event.

Dr. Seamus Ross, Dean of the Faculty of Information (iSchool), and Coach House Institute Acting Director, will present the fall program of events conceived to engage a growing community of intersecting ideas in casting a forward vision from the prescient legacy of McLuhan.

WHEN: Tuesday, October 20, 2015, 6 pm to 8 pm

WHERE: Coach House Institute, 39A Queen’s Park Crescent East, Toronto (free parking available off 121 St. Joseph St.)

About The McLuhan Program for Culture and Technology
The McLuhan Program’s mandate is to encourage understanding of the impact of technology on culture and society from theoretical and practical perspectives, continuing and building on the ground-breaking work initiated by Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980). McLuhan’s meteoric influence in the late twentieth century was electrifying and global, and has emerged as prescient in the rapidly changing digital global village of the 21st century.

About the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information (iSchool)
Known as Canada’s global information school, the iSchool, which houses the McLuhan Program, is a leading graduate-level educator in the fields of information sciences, library studies, archives and records management, digital curation, knowledge management, museum studies, and culture and technology.