Megan Boler
Biographic Data
| ID | 103773 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Megan Boler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Megan |
| FAMILY NAME | Boler |
| SIGNATURE | BOLER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2379-4635 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 57 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Promoting Mis/Disinformation Literacy Among Adults: A Scoping Review of Interventions and Recommendations
This scoping review contributes an overview of recent research on effective media literacy interventions and recommendations relevant to cultivating critical mis/disinformation literacies for adults. The review examines articles published between 1 January 2016–22 November 2021 that report on or provide recommendations for media literacy interventions for adults suited to the emerging challenges of disinformation. Our findings reveal diverse inte…
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
Drawing on our 3-year digital ethnography of cross-partisan debates in the context of the 2020 US election and January 6 Capitol insurrection, this essay examines the affective and discursive dimensions of online polarization, contributing new understandings of how genre functions as a system of norms that shapes emotional performance online. Through a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework, we demonstrate melodrama's role as a fundamental stor…
Cruel, Convenient, and Intimate Publics: Berlant's Lessons for Loneliness and Digital Media Commons
Lauren Berlant’s contributions chart innovative conceptual frameworks to help us understand how affect and emotion, desires and hopes traverse the public and private realms. However, rather surprisingly, Berlant’s work does not engage directly with explorations of digital culture and its effects, nor has it been used extensively in the analysis of digital culture. We begin by updating Berlant’s descriptions of how we think about the contemporary …
Affect, Protest, Pandemic: Conversations from the crises of 2020
The conversations collected in this Special Section speak to the events and upheavals of 2020 and the political climate that led up to these events, particularly focusing on the shifting emphasis on emotion in politics that emerged in so-called ‘post-truth’ discourse. The Covid-19 pandemic was initially hailed as a unifying experience, but this conception quickly shattered as the unequal effects of the pandemic were made visible. At the same time…
On taking the affective turn: Interview with Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, and Deborah Gould
The biopolitics of pandemics: Interview with Ed Cohen
Responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, in ‘The Biopolitics of Pandemics,’ Ed Cohen discusses the contradictions in medical, juridical, and popular thought that conceive of both disease and immunity as things that happen to individual bodies, belying our profound interconnectedness and interdependence
Discourses of Victimhood and Identity Politics on Social Media: Understanding Affective Polarization During the Us Election
This cross-platform digital ethnography examines the nuances of how emotions are expressed and who they are directed towards within social media in order to better understand the phenomenon of affective polarization and the increased emotionality online. As part of a larger three-year SSHRC-funded comparative study between the US and Canadian elections, the focused dataset for this project draws on grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and our explorat…
Affective Discourse Analysis and Social Media: Methodological Innovations in the Cross-Platform Study of Emotion and Race on Twitter, Gab, and Facebook
In the context of the so-called "post-truth" crisis, emotions have resoundingly replaced facts in our fast-moving, affectively-driven internet-based culture. Scholars are challenged to develop innovative methods for studying emotion and affect within studies of social media, and political communications. What is an effective interdisciplinary approach to the study of affect and communications in our rapidly-evolving media ecosystems? While the "a…
Narratives in America: The Connection Between Affective Polarization and Victimhood in the 2020 Us Election
This study explores the emotions, beliefs, and deep stories about the self and other that are held by individuals on the political right and left in America in order to understand the manifestation of affective polarization during divisive historical moments. It also documents expressions of victimhood, villainhood, and privilege to determine how they intersect with narratives about the ingroup and outgroup. Horwitz (2018) argues that victimhood …
Melodramatic Platforms: The Affective Theatre of Polarized Political Storytelling on Social Media
Once a site of promise for democratizing mass communication, the internet has also become a site of problematic information and polarized affect. Contrary to claims that polarization is not necessarily encouraged by social media platforms; our two-year, mixed-methods study of affect and narratives of race and national belonging in social media discourses of the 2019 Canadian and 2020 U.S. federal elections reveals clearly polarized collective pol…
Troubling Hope: Performing Inventive Connections in Discomforting Times
The affective politics of the “post-truth” era: Feeling rules and networked subjectivity
Interview with Megan Boler: From ‘Feminist Politics of Emotions’ to the ‘Affective Turn’
DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media
Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times
Hypes, hopes and actualities: New digital Cartesianism and bodies in cyberspace
‘New Digital Cartesianism’ investigates the socio-material power inequities embedded in text-based, computer-mediated communication (CMC). Is the body really transcended in text-based computer-mediated communication? This article summarizes software and hardware advertising ‘hypes’, cyber-enthusiast ‘hopes’, and the ‘actualities’ of CMC which contradict this virtual dream of pure minds communicating. Marketing hypes and cyberhopes mythologize dis…
Masculinity on Trial: Undressing Homophobia in the Bible Belt
Do you guys hate Aucklanders too?” Youth: Voicing difference from the rural heartland
Responding to the Paradoxes of Feeling Power
The risks of empathy: Interrogating multiculturalism's gaze
Empathy is widely embraced as a means of educating the social imagination; from John Dewey to Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West to bell hooks, we find empathy advocated as the foundation for democracy and social change. In this article I examine how students' readings of Art Spiegelman's MAUS, a comicbook genre depiction of his father's survival of Nazi Germany, produces the Aristotelian version of empathy advocated by Nussbaum. This ‘passive empathy’…
The risks of empathy: Interrogating multiculturalism's gaze
Empathy is widely embraced as a means of educating the social imagination; from John Dewey to Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West to bell hooks, we find empathy advocated as the foundation for democracy and social change. In this article I examine how students' readings of Art Spiegelman's MAUS, a comicbook genre depiction of his father's survival of Nazi Germany, produces the Aristotelian version of empathy advocated by Nussbaum. This ‘passive empathy’…
Do you guys hate Aucklanders too?” Youth: Voicing difference from the rural heartland
Hypes, hopes and actualities: New digital Cartesianism and bodies in cyberspace
‘New Digital Cartesianism’ investigates the socio-material power inequities embedded in text-based, computer-mediated communication (CMC). Is the body really transcended in text-based computer-mediated communication? This article summarizes software and hardware advertising ‘hypes’, cyber-enthusiast ‘hopes’, and the ‘actualities’ of CMC which contradict this virtual dream of pure minds communicating. Marketing hypes and cyberhopes mythologize dis…
Troubling Hope: Performing Inventive Connections in Discomforting Times
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
Drawing on our 3-year digital ethnography of cross-partisan debates in the context of the 2020 US election and January 6 Capitol insurrection, this essay examines the affective and discursive dimensions of online polarization, contributing new understandings of how genre functions as a system of norms that shapes emotional performance online. Through a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework, we demonstrate melodrama's role as a fundamental stor…
Masculinity on Trial: Undressing Homophobia in the Bible Belt
The risks of empathy: Interrogating multiculturalism's gaze
Empathy is widely embraced as a means of educating the social imagination; from John Dewey to Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West to bell hooks, we find empathy advocated as the foundation for democracy and social change. In this article I examine how students' readings of Art Spiegelman's MAUS, a comicbook genre depiction of his father's survival of Nazi Germany, produces the Aristotelian version of empathy advocated by Nussbaum. This ‘passive empathy’…
Responding to the Paradoxes of Feeling Power
Do you guys hate Aucklanders too?” Youth: Voicing difference from the rural heartland
Masculinity on Trial: Undressing Homophobia in the Bible Belt
Hypes, hopes and actualities: New digital Cartesianism and bodies in cyberspace
‘New Digital Cartesianism’ investigates the socio-material power inequities embedded in text-based, computer-mediated communication (CMC). Is the body really transcended in text-based computer-mediated communication? This article summarizes software and hardware advertising ‘hypes’, cyber-enthusiast ‘hopes’, and the ‘actualities’ of CMC which contradict this virtual dream of pure minds communicating. Marketing hypes and cyberhopes mythologize dis…
Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times
DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media
Interview with Megan Boler: From ‘Feminist Politics of Emotions’ to the ‘Affective Turn’
The affective politics of the “post-truth” era: Feeling rules and networked subjectivity
Troubling Hope: Performing Inventive Connections in Discomforting Times
Discourses of Victimhood and Identity Politics on Social Media: Understanding Affective Polarization During the Us Election
This cross-platform digital ethnography examines the nuances of how emotions are expressed and who they are directed towards within social media in order to better understand the phenomenon of affective polarization and the increased emotionality online. As part of a larger three-year SSHRC-funded comparative study between the US and Canadian elections, the focused dataset for this project draws on grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and our explorat…
Affective Discourse Analysis and Social Media: Methodological Innovations in the Cross-Platform Study of Emotion and Race on Twitter, Gab, and Facebook
In the context of the so-called "post-truth" crisis, emotions have resoundingly replaced facts in our fast-moving, affectively-driven internet-based culture. Scholars are challenged to develop innovative methods for studying emotion and affect within studies of social media, and political communications. What is an effective interdisciplinary approach to the study of affect and communications in our rapidly-evolving media ecosystems? While the "a…
Narratives in America: The Connection Between Affective Polarization and Victimhood in the 2020 Us Election
This study explores the emotions, beliefs, and deep stories about the self and other that are held by individuals on the political right and left in America in order to understand the manifestation of affective polarization during divisive historical moments. It also documents expressions of victimhood, villainhood, and privilege to determine how they intersect with narratives about the ingroup and outgroup. Horwitz (2018) argues that victimhood …
Melodramatic Platforms: The Affective Theatre of Polarized Political Storytelling on Social Media
Once a site of promise for democratizing mass communication, the internet has also become a site of problematic information and polarized affect. Contrary to claims that polarization is not necessarily encouraged by social media platforms; our two-year, mixed-methods study of affect and narratives of race and national belonging in social media discourses of the 2019 Canadian and 2020 U.S. federal elections reveals clearly polarized collective pol…
Affect, Protest, Pandemic: Conversations from the crises of 2020
The conversations collected in this Special Section speak to the events and upheavals of 2020 and the political climate that led up to these events, particularly focusing on the shifting emphasis on emotion in politics that emerged in so-called ‘post-truth’ discourse. The Covid-19 pandemic was initially hailed as a unifying experience, but this conception quickly shattered as the unequal effects of the pandemic were made visible. At the same time…
On taking the affective turn: Interview with Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, and Deborah Gould
The biopolitics of pandemics: Interview with Ed Cohen
Responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, in ‘The Biopolitics of Pandemics,’ Ed Cohen discusses the contradictions in medical, juridical, and popular thought that conceive of both disease and immunity as things that happen to individual bodies, belying our profound interconnectedness and interdependence
Cruel, Convenient, and Intimate Publics: Berlant's Lessons for Loneliness and Digital Media Commons
Lauren Berlant’s contributions chart innovative conceptual frameworks to help us understand how affect and emotion, desires and hopes traverse the public and private realms. However, rather surprisingly, Berlant’s work does not engage directly with explorations of digital culture and its effects, nor has it been used extensively in the analysis of digital culture. We begin by updating Berlant’s descriptions of how we think about the contemporary …
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
Drawing on our 3-year digital ethnography of cross-partisan debates in the context of the 2020 US election and January 6 Capitol insurrection, this essay examines the affective and discursive dimensions of online polarization, contributing new understandings of how genre functions as a system of norms that shapes emotional performance online. Through a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework, we demonstrate melodrama's role as a fundamental stor…
Promoting Mis/Disinformation Literacy Among Adults: A Scoping Review of Interventions and Recommendations
This scoping review contributes an overview of recent research on effective media literacy interventions and recommendations relevant to cultivating critical mis/disinformation literacies for adults. The review examines articles published between 1 January 2016–22 November 2021 that report on or provide recommendations for media literacy interventions for adults suited to the emerging challenges of disinformation. Our findings reveal diverse inte…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Media studies (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Social Media and Politics (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works)