Short Bio
Megan Boler is Professor at the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and earned her Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include Affective Politics of Digital Media: Propaganda By Other Means (eds. Boler and Davis, London: Routledge, 2020); Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (Routledge 1999); Democratic Dialogue in Education (Peter Lang 2004); Digital Media and Democracy(MIT Press 2008); and DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media (eds. Ratto and Boler, MIT Press 2014). Funded by Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council, her current research examines the linguistic and rhetorical expression of emotions related to narratives of racial and national belonging within Canadian and U.S. election-related social media. Forthcoming co-authored essays include “Rethinking Polarization through the Social Media Dispositif: Affect, Melodrama, and Digital Governmentality in Online Cross-Partisan Debate”, as well as a scoping review of disinformation literacy targeting adults from 2016 to the present funded by the Canada Herotage Digital Citizen Contribution Program. Also forthcoming is new work examining ressentiment’s digital and polarized expression and form, specifically understudied aspects of its neoliberal context and character, and of the similarities and differences in ressentiment’s expression and manifestations across the political spectrum.
Previous SSHRC-funded research projects include: “Rethinking Media Democracy and Citizenship,” which examined the motivations of producers of web-based challenges to traditional news (2005-08); “Social Media in the Hands of Young Citizens” (2010-13) was a mixed-methods study of women participants’ experience in the Occupy Wall Street movement, including interviews with women in seven North American cities. Her web-based productions include the official study guide to the documentary The Corporation (dirs. Achbar and Abbott 2003), and the multimedia website Critical Media Literacy in Times of War. She teaches graduate courses in media and communications, cultural studies, and in critical theory and feminist philosophies.
