Special Issue of Electronic Journal of Communication coming soon!

Megan Boler and Ted Gournelos, eds., “Irony and Politics: User-Producers, Parody, and Digital Publics,” (forthcoming September 2008) http://www.cios.org/www/ejcmain.htm

Just released! Digital Media and Democracy:Tactics in Hard Times (MIT Press, 2008)

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11464
(you can download  Introduction for free as a PDF from the MIT link)

In an age of proliferating media and news sources, who has the power to define reality? Today, the “social web” - epitomized by blogs, viral videos, and YouTube - creates new pathways for truth to emerge and makes possible new tactics for media activism. In Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (MIT Press, 2008), leading scholars in media and communication studies, media activists, journalists, and artists explore the contradiction at the heart of the relationship between truth and power today: the fact that the radical democratization of knowledge and multiplication of sources and voices made possible by digital media coexists with the blatant falsification of information by political and corporate powers.

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 DemocracyNow!, Media Matters host Robert McChesney, and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera.

DEMOCRATIC DIALOGUE IN EDUCATION: TROUBLING SPEECH, DISTURBING SILENCE (2004)

Drawing from disciplines of philosophy, political theory, critical race theory, sociology, and feminist and post-structural studies, the essays in Democratic Dialogue in Education examine issues arising from the conceptualizing of hate speech, freedom of expression, speech codes and political correctness, and voice and agency. What are the limits of speech in classrooms, and how are classrooms distinct from other kinds of public space? How do we understand silence as well as speech within the field of cultural differences at play in educational spaces? Questions of social justice, equity, racial identities and sexual differences are central to the pedagogical philosophies and practices addressed by these diverse scholars.

FEELING POWER: EMOTIONS AND EDUCATION (1999)

In Feeling Power Emotions and Education (Routledge 1999) Megan Boler combines cultural history with ethical and multicultural analyses to explore how emotions have been disciplined, suppressed or ignored at all levels of education and educational theory. Feeling Power begins by charting the philosophies and practices developed over the last century to control social conflicts arising from gender, class and race. The book traces the development of progressive pedagogies from civil rights and women’s liberation movements, to the author’s recent studies of “emotional intelligence” and emotional literacy.” She concludes by outlining a “pedagogy of discomfort” that examines the empathy, fear and anger to negotiate ethics and difference. Drawing on the formulation of emotion as knowledge within feminist and poststructuralist theories, Boler develops a unique theory of emotion missing from contemporary philosophical and theoretical discourses.