I’m Krysten Stein, PhD (she/her), a digital governance and platform researcher and qualitative scholar studying how media systems shape care, identity, labor, and everyday life.
My work examines digital platforms and media industries, including reality television and creator economies, as sites where mental health discourse, gendered and emotional labor, and participation are produced and governed. I focus on how platform rules, metrics, and monetization structures shape visibility, credibility, and responsibility, and on what I call theratainment: when care is transformed into content, entertainment, and cultural labor. Grounded in feminist media studies, I use qualitative and ethnographic methods to translate lived experience into insights that inform research, education, policy, and public understanding.
My work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Gender & Society, International Journal of Communication, and International Journal of Communication. My first book, And How Does That Make You Feel? Theratainment and the Digital Commodification of Mental Health (University of California Press, under contract), theorizes mental health content as a media genre and examines how platform power and emotional labor reshape care into cultural production.
Beyond academia, I collaborate with journalists and organizations on questions of platform accountability, digital labor, and care ethics. My work has been featured in NBC News, The Guardian, Business Insider, and CNN. I am a Research Affiliate with the Intersectional Technology Lab at the University of Michigan and the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, serve as Social Media Editor for Feminist Media Studies, and co-founded the Content Creator Scholars Network.
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College. Across my work, I am guided by care-centered, justice-oriented, and evidence-based approaches to understanding and reshaping contemporary media and platform systems.
Where platforms, power, and care collide 