Short Bio
Megan Boler is Full 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, forthcoming October 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). Her current three-year, SSHRC-funded is a cross-platform, mixed-methods study of the role of emotional expression related to narratives of racial and national belonging within Canadian and U.S. election-related social media. Her previous 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.
