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 Director of the Centre for Media Culture & Education (CMCE). She 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, 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, from 2019-23 she served as PI for a large research team, to explore the polarization and emotional expression on social media platforms, specifically with respect to narratives of racial and national belonging within the 2019 Canadian and 2020 US election. Recent essays include “Digital Affect Culture and the Logics of Melodrama: Online Polarization and the January 6 Capitol Riots through the Lens of Genre and Affective Discourse Analysis,” in Social Media + Society (2024). Forthcoming essays include a scoping review exploring disinformation literacy targeting adults from 2016 to the present, in Communication Research, and “Digital Ressentiment and the Neoliberal Logics of Pain” to be included in The Routledge Companion to Digital Media & Democracy (ed. Zizi Papacharissi) examining the digital and polarized expression and form of ressentiment, its neoliberal context and character, and 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.
