I’m Krysten Stein, PhD (she/her), a scholar of platform governance, digital culture, and care. My work examines how contemporary media systems transform mental health, identity, and emotional labor into forms of visibility, value, and control.
I study digital platforms and media industries, including TikTok, reality television, and creator economies, as sites where care is produced, circulated, and governed. I argue that mental health content has emerged as a distinct media genre shaped by platform logics, which I conceptualize as theratainment: the transformation of care into content, entertainment, and cultural labor. Grounded in feminist media studies, my research traces how platform rules, metrics, and monetization structures shape credibility, responsibility, and what I call trustwork—the ongoing labor of performing authenticity and care under algorithmic conditions. Using qualitative and ethnographic methods, I translate lived experience into insights that inform research, education, policy, and public discourse.
My work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Gender & Society, and International Journal of Communication, among others. 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 sit on the editorial board of Creator & Influencer Studies, the first international journal dedicated to creator and influencer research. I am also a co-founder of 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 