Short Bio
Megan Boler is Full Professor and Associate Chair of 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 and Education. 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, London: Routledge, 2020); Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (Routledge, 1999); Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (MIT Press, 2008); DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media (eds. Ratto and Boler, MIT Press, 2014); and Democratic Dialogue in Education (Peter Lang, 2004). During 2024-25 she was PI of two funded research projects: “Queering Digital Tools Against Hate: Countering 2SLGBTQI Mis-/Disinformation with Community-Informed Digital Stories, Gamification, and Resources“, with co-PI Professor Mark Lipton (University of Guelph) and non-profit partner Egale Canada, funded by the Canadian Heritage Digital Citizen Contribution Program ($296,600). Outputs include a web-based educational tool, and three articles currently under review with top peer-reviewed journals Games and Culture, Sexualities, and Educational Technology and Society. She was also PI of a project reviewing “AI Anxiety among College and University Students,” Inlight University of Toronto, $10,000, with an essay under review with International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (Boler, M., R. Haidar and Y. Kweon). In 2024, she completed a pilot study of AI Ethics and Computer Science Education (funded by two SIG Research Awards). Conducted between 2023-2025, this study explored computer science (CS) students’ ethical concerns regarding issues of transparency, bias and privacy in developing AI, and their perspectives on AI ethics education in the CS and Engineering Departments at UT. Research was conducted by PI Dr. Boler and a team of two research assistants and four established faculty researchers in fields of AI ethics and Human-Computer Interaction: Professors Ahmed (CS Dept, UT), Stark (Information School, University of Western Ontario), Eglash (CS Dept, University of Michigan) and Posada (American Studies, Yale University). Study included: focus groups with CS and Engineering students at UT; interviews with AI practitioners and Intergovernmental policy stakeholders from the United Nations and UNESCO; environmental scan of ethics curriculum in top 50 CS programs across the US and Canada; consultative process with methods experts and project collaborators; extensive literature review of ethics in computer science and engineering education.
She recently completed a SSHRC-funded is a cross-platform, mixed-methods study (2018-2023) on the role of emotional expression related to narratives of racial and national belonging within Canadian and U.S. election-related social media. Her previous SSHRC-funded major research projects include “Rethinking Media Democracy and Citizenship,” which examined the motivations of producers of web-based challenges to traditional news (2005-08), and “Social Media in the Hands of Young Citizens” (2010-13), a mixed-methods study of women participants’ experience in the Occupy Wall Street movement (all of which were funded by Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council). 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.
