Megan Boler
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.
Supervisors: Donna Haraway and Helene Moglen
Phone: 416 978 1231
Address: 252 Bloor St West
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.
Supervisors: Donna Haraway and Helene Moglen
Phone: 416 978 1231
Address: 252 Bloor St West
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Radically expanding the study of media and political communications, this book bridges the humanities and social sciences to explore affective information economies, and how emotions are being weaponized within mediatized political landscapes. The chapters cover a wide range of topics: how clickbait, “fake news,” and right-wing actors deploy and weaponize emotion; new theoretical directions for understanding affect, algorithms, and public spheres; and how the wedding of big data and behavioral science enables new frontiers of propaganda, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal. The collection includes original interviews with luminary media scholars and journalists.
This book features contributions from established and emerging scholars of communications, media studies, affect theory, journalism, policy studies, gender studies, and critical race studies to address questions of concern to scholars, journalists, and students in these fields and beyond.
"This book makes a fundamental contribution to feminist theory. Feeling Power gives rare insight into the politics of emotion in education. Boler is passionate about centering emotion in our understanding of intelligence and social action." -- Donna Haraway, author of Modest Witness@Second Millenium.FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience
"This book argues for the need to situate the often isolated and isolating work we do in education in a historical and political framework - one that accounts for class, economic, and power relationships that we both identify with and are identified within. . . Boler ruptures the 'absent presence' of emotions in our professional lives; that is, she dares to move emotion away from the terrain of the unspeakable and into the territory of the spoken, considered, and hence 'knowable.'. . .Feeling Power is a text that promises discomfort, and might very well move us from complacency to action, from slumber to consciousness. . . For its power to unsettle the commonplaces of thought, for its power to cause us to recognize discomfort as a starting point of critique, we should all commend the author of Feeling Power" --Jennifer Driscoll (Univ. of Wisconsin - Milwaukee) for JAC, Vol. 20.3 (2000)."
"Feeling Power is a groundbreaking work that strikes a mortal blow against the separation of reason and emotion that has defined our thinking about the role emotions play in our lives. Boler's impressive and historically-informed study provides powerful new directions for thinking about emotions in relation to social control, education, and resistance." -- Sandra Lee Bartky, author of Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression
"Feeling Power is a wide-ranging, thought provoking and stimulating analysis of an important and little-examined nexus: the place of emotion in cognition, power and pedagogy." -- Ruth Frankenberg, author of White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness"
This collection brings into dialogue authors from a range of disciplines and perspectives to address the thorny question of how to balance the demands of "democratic dialogue" with the reality of a world in which each voice does not carry equal weight. Should rules be in place, for example, that correct for such imbalances by privileging some voices or muting others? Should separate spaces be created for traditionally disadvantaged groups to speak only among themselves? Is democratic dialogue in an inclusive sense even a possibility in a world divided by multiple dimensions of power and privilege?
Leading theorists from several countries share a concern for social justice and present radically different interpretations of what democracy means for educational practice. In a format unusual for such collections, the essays speak directly to each other about significant moral, philosophical, and practical differences regarding how to effectively engage students as critical participants in classrooms fraught with power and difference. The authors draw from philosophy, critical race theory, sociology, feminist, and poststructural studies to address topics including hate speech, freedom of expression, speech codes, the meanings of silence, conceptions of voice and agency, and "political correctness." They explore honestly and self-critically the troubling and disturbing dimensions of speech and silence that situate the classroom as a volatile microcosm of contemporary political contradictions."
At this millennial point in history, questions of cynicism, despair and hope arise at every turn, especially within areas of research into social justice and the struggle for transformation in education. While a sense of fatalism and despair is easily recognizable, establishing compelling bases for hope is more difficult. This book addresses the absence of sustained analyses of hope that simultaneously recognize the hard edges of why we despair.
The volume posits the notion of critical hope not only as conceptual and theoretical, but also as an action-oriented response to despair. Our notion of critical hope is used in two ways: it is used firstly as a unitary concept which cannot be disaggregated into either hopefulness or criticality, and secondly, as an analytical concept, where critical hope is engaged and diversely theorized in ways that recognize aspects of individual and collective directions of critical hope. The book is divided into four sub-sections:
Critical Hope in Education
Critical Hope and a Critique of Neoliberalism
Critical Race Theory/Postcolonial Perspectives on Critical Hope
Philosophical Overviews of Critical Hope.
Education can be a purveyor of critical hope, but it also requires critical hope so that it, as a sector itself, can be transformative. With contributions from international experts in the field, the book will be of value to all academics and practitioners working in the field of education.
The book maps a new digital media landscape that features citizen journalism, The Daily Show, blogging, and alternative media. The contributors discuss broad questions of media and politics, offer nuanced analyses of change in journalism, and undertake detailed examinations of the use of Web-based media in shaping political and social movements. The chapters include not only essays by noted media scholars but also interviews with such journalists and media activists as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Media Matters host Robert McChesney, and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera.
Contributors and Interviewees:
Shaina Anand, Chris Atton, Megan Boler, Axel Bruns, Jodi Dean, Ron J. Deibert, Deepa Fernandes, Amy Goodman, Brian Holmes, Hassan Ibrahim, Geert Lovink, Nathalie Magnan, Robert McChesney, Graham Meikle, Susan D. Moeller, Alessandra Renzi, Ricardo Rosas, Andréa Schmidt, Trebor Scholz, D. Travers Scott, R. Sophie Statzel, Stephen Turpin.
About the Editor
Megan Boler is a Professor in Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and a graduate of the History of Consciouness Program, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her other books include Feeling Power: Emotions and Education and Democratic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, Disturbing Silence. Her essays are published in such journals as New Media and Society, Cultural Studies, and Women's Studies Quarterly."
Radically expanding the study of media and political communications, this book bridges the humanities and social sciences to explore affective information economies, and how emotions are being weaponized within mediatized political landscapes. The chapters cover a wide range of topics: how clickbait, “fake news,” and right-wing actors deploy and weaponize emotion; new theoretical directions for understanding affect, algorithms, and public spheres; and how the wedding of big data and behavioral science enables new frontiers of propaganda, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal. The collection includes original interviews with luminary media scholars and journalists.
This book features contributions from established and emerging scholars of communications, media studies, affect theory, journalism, policy studies, gender studies, and critical race studies to address questions of concern to scholars, journalists, and students in these fields and beyond.
"This book makes a fundamental contribution to feminist theory. Feeling Power gives rare insight into the politics of emotion in education. Boler is passionate about centering emotion in our understanding of intelligence and social action." -- Donna Haraway, author of Modest Witness@Second Millenium.FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience
"This book argues for the need to situate the often isolated and isolating work we do in education in a historical and political framework - one that accounts for class, economic, and power relationships that we both identify with and are identified within. . . Boler ruptures the 'absent presence' of emotions in our professional lives; that is, she dares to move emotion away from the terrain of the unspeakable and into the territory of the spoken, considered, and hence 'knowable.'. . .Feeling Power is a text that promises discomfort, and might very well move us from complacency to action, from slumber to consciousness. . . For its power to unsettle the commonplaces of thought, for its power to cause us to recognize discomfort as a starting point of critique, we should all commend the author of Feeling Power" --Jennifer Driscoll (Univ. of Wisconsin - Milwaukee) for JAC, Vol. 20.3 (2000)."
"Feeling Power is a groundbreaking work that strikes a mortal blow against the separation of reason and emotion that has defined our thinking about the role emotions play in our lives. Boler's impressive and historically-informed study provides powerful new directions for thinking about emotions in relation to social control, education, and resistance." -- Sandra Lee Bartky, author of Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression
"Feeling Power is a wide-ranging, thought provoking and stimulating analysis of an important and little-examined nexus: the place of emotion in cognition, power and pedagogy." -- Ruth Frankenberg, author of White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness"
This collection brings into dialogue authors from a range of disciplines and perspectives to address the thorny question of how to balance the demands of "democratic dialogue" with the reality of a world in which each voice does not carry equal weight. Should rules be in place, for example, that correct for such imbalances by privileging some voices or muting others? Should separate spaces be created for traditionally disadvantaged groups to speak only among themselves? Is democratic dialogue in an inclusive sense even a possibility in a world divided by multiple dimensions of power and privilege?
Leading theorists from several countries share a concern for social justice and present radically different interpretations of what democracy means for educational practice. In a format unusual for such collections, the essays speak directly to each other about significant moral, philosophical, and practical differences regarding how to effectively engage students as critical participants in classrooms fraught with power and difference. The authors draw from philosophy, critical race theory, sociology, feminist, and poststructural studies to address topics including hate speech, freedom of expression, speech codes, the meanings of silence, conceptions of voice and agency, and "political correctness." They explore honestly and self-critically the troubling and disturbing dimensions of speech and silence that situate the classroom as a volatile microcosm of contemporary political contradictions."
At this millennial point in history, questions of cynicism, despair and hope arise at every turn, especially within areas of research into social justice and the struggle for transformation in education. While a sense of fatalism and despair is easily recognizable, establishing compelling bases for hope is more difficult. This book addresses the absence of sustained analyses of hope that simultaneously recognize the hard edges of why we despair.
The volume posits the notion of critical hope not only as conceptual and theoretical, but also as an action-oriented response to despair. Our notion of critical hope is used in two ways: it is used firstly as a unitary concept which cannot be disaggregated into either hopefulness or criticality, and secondly, as an analytical concept, where critical hope is engaged and diversely theorized in ways that recognize aspects of individual and collective directions of critical hope. The book is divided into four sub-sections:
Critical Hope in Education
Critical Hope and a Critique of Neoliberalism
Critical Race Theory/Postcolonial Perspectives on Critical Hope
Philosophical Overviews of Critical Hope.
Education can be a purveyor of critical hope, but it also requires critical hope so that it, as a sector itself, can be transformative. With contributions from international experts in the field, the book will be of value to all academics and practitioners working in the field of education.
The book maps a new digital media landscape that features citizen journalism, The Daily Show, blogging, and alternative media. The contributors discuss broad questions of media and politics, offer nuanced analyses of change in journalism, and undertake detailed examinations of the use of Web-based media in shaping political and social movements. The chapters include not only essays by noted media scholars but also interviews with such journalists and media activists as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Media Matters host Robert McChesney, and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera.
Contributors and Interviewees:
Shaina Anand, Chris Atton, Megan Boler, Axel Bruns, Jodi Dean, Ron J. Deibert, Deepa Fernandes, Amy Goodman, Brian Holmes, Hassan Ibrahim, Geert Lovink, Nathalie Magnan, Robert McChesney, Graham Meikle, Susan D. Moeller, Alessandra Renzi, Ricardo Rosas, Andréa Schmidt, Trebor Scholz, D. Travers Scott, R. Sophie Statzel, Stephen Turpin.
About the Editor
Megan Boler is a Professor in Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and a graduate of the History of Consciouness Program, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her other books include Feeling Power: Emotions and Education and Democratic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, Disturbing Silence. Her essays are published in such journals as New Media and Society, Cultural Studies, and Women's Studies Quarterly."
This website is intended to provide teachers with ideas and resources that allow them to structure lessons relating to TVO's presentation of The Corporation.
It provides curriculum correlations, lesson ideas, and reproducible blackline masters for a variety of secondary school courses. A list of relevant Internet Web sites that represent different points-of-view has also been provided to allow for extensions of content in the film. Key themes that are covered include:
•Ethics
•Corporate social responsibility
•Politics and ideology
•Economic and social interdependence among individuals, corporations and nations
•Impacts of commercial activity on individuals, communities and the environment
•Impacts of globalization
This resource guide for teachers was generously provided by The Ontario Institute of Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.
The Corporation is a documentary that looks at the concept of the corporation throughout recent history up to its present-day dominance.
You will find visually-engaging, extensively researched primary document news material demonstrating contradictory stories told by domestic and international media reporting on: civilian casualties, effects on sanctions on Iraq, anti-war protests
You will find analyses of word choice, tone, headlines, sources.
Test how YOU read the media, what you have been told and not told!
Issue 26 2015 Entanglements - Activism and Technology
Editors: Pip Shea, Tanya Notley, Jean Burgess, Su Ballard
Articles:
FCJ-188 Disability’s Digital Frictions:
Activism, Technology, and Politics—Katie Ellis, Gerard Goggin, Mike Kent
FCJ-189 Reimagining Work: Entanglements and Frictions around Future of Work Narratives—Laura Forlano, Megan Halpern
FCJ-190 Building a Better Twitter: A Study of the Twitter Alternatives GNU social, Quitter, rstat.us, and Twister—Robert W. Gehl
FCJ-191 Mirroring the Videos of Anonymous: Cloud Activism, Living Networks, and Political Mimesis—Adam Fish
FCJ-192 Sand in the Information Society Machine: How Digital Technologies Change and Challenge the Paradigms of Civil Disobedience—Theresa Züger, Stefania Milan & Leonie Maria Tanczer
FCJ-193 Harbouring Dissent: Greek Independent and Social Media and the Antifascist Movement—Sky Croeser & Tim Highfield
FCJ-194 From #RaceFail to #Ferguson: The Digital Intimacies of Race-Activist Hashtag Publics—Nathan Rambukanna
FCJ-195 Privacy, Responsibility, and Human Rights Activism—Becky Kazansky
FCJ-196 Let’s First Get Things Done! On Division of Labour and
Techno-political Practices of Delegation in Times of Crisis—Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Jara Rocha & Femke Snelting
FCJ-197 Entanglements with Media and Technologies in the
Occupy Movement—Megan Boler & Jennie Phillips
Practitioner Reports:
FCJMESH-005 Technology and Citizen Witnessing:
Navigating the Friction Between Dual Desires for Visibility and Obscurity—Sam Gregory
FCJMESH-006 From Information Activism to the Politics of Data—
Maya Indira Ganesh and Stephanie Hankey
FCJMESH-007 Our Enduring Confusion About the
Power of Digital Tools in Protest—Ivan Sigal and Ellery Biddle
FCJMESH-008 Solutions for Online Harassment Don’t Come Easily—Jillian C. York
FCJMESH-009 Ranking Digital Rights: Keeping the Internet Safe for Advocacy—Nathalie Maréchal
FCJMESH-010 Getting Open Development Right—Zara Rahman
FCJMESH-011 : ‘We don’t work with video, we work with People’:
Reflections on Participatory Video Activism in Indonesia—M. Zamzam Fauzanafi & Kampung Halaman