Dr. Shelley Boulianne

Ralph Klein Chair

Dr. Shelley Boulianne is the R. Klein Chair (Full Professor) in Communication Studies at Mount Royal University (Canada) and a visiting professor at Lund University (Jan 2026 to Dec 2027). She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has held professor positions in sociology at MacEwan University (Canada), in politics at the Université Catholique de Lille (France), and in politics and international relations at the University of Southampton (UK). She has completed research fellowships at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society (Germany) and the Digital Democracy Center at the University of Southern Denmark. She is the North American editor at Information, Communication & Society (ICS) and an Associate Editor at Social Science Computer Review (SSCR). She is the section chair-elect for the Information Technology & Politics section of the American Political Science Association and serves on five editorial boards for journals in social sciences.

She studies the global dynamics of digital media use for citizen engagement in civic and political life. Specifically, she studies digital media use (news consumption, social networking) to motivate civic and political participation, such as volunteering, marching, boycotting, and petitioning. She has co-authored a book about the role of news media use and online social networks in political consumerism using a comparative approach (published by Cambridge University Press). She is writing another book about the role of social media in marches and demonstrations (under contract with Cambridge University Press). Finally, she is editing a volume (under contract with Elgar) about political participation, which highlights traditional and new forms of participation such as social media expression, online petitions, online donating, sharing misinformation, and participation in deliberative mini-publics and town hall meetings. Much of her published work has involved cross-national surveys (2017, 2019, 2021, 2023, and 2025); these data are shared in online repositories alongside preregistered analysis plans and replication files. She has published a series of highly cited meta-analyses on the topics of digital media use, political behaviour, and public opinion, including a recent study published in Science Advances.

From June 2025 to March 2027, she is working on a SSHRC-funded project to study the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in meta-analysis to inform public policies about information and communication technologies (ICTs). This work includes studying the academic scholarship cited in public policies related to the youth social media ban and AI chatbots. She has published 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and dozens of book chapters.