This page offers an overview of my research program and ongoing areas of inquiry. For a complete record of publications, presentations, teaching, and service, please see my full CV and Google Scholar profile below.
Core Research Areas
- Platform Governance and Digital Care
- I examine how digital platforms structure responsibility, accountability, trust, and care through policies, algorithms, moderation systems, and monetization practices. This work explores how platform governance shapes everyday experiences of support, risk, visibility, and participation.
- Theratainment and Mental Health Media
- My research investigates how therapy, mental health discourse, and care practices are transformed into content, labor, and cultural production across social media platforms and reality television. Through concepts including theratainment, the care paradox, ambient caregiving, compulsory care labor, and trustwork, I analyze the consequences of making care visible, monetizable, and algorithmically distributed.
- Creator Economies, Reality Television, and Media Industries
- I study how visibility, authenticity, credibility, and influence are produced and managed across creator culture, reality television, and platformed media industries. This work focuses on the labor, performance, and value systems that structure participation in contemporary media ecosystems.
- Feminist and Qualitative Approaches to Platform Studies
- Using interviews, discourse analysis, digital ethnography, and critical-cultural approaches, I examine power, identity, labor, and inequality in digital systems. My methodological work draws on feminist traditions that foreground lived experience, embodiment, reflexivity, and questions of justice.
Research Affiliations
- Intersectional Technology Lab, University of Michigan
- Center on Digital Culture and Society, University of Pennsylvania
- Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), UCLA
CV and Profiles
|| my full CV || google scholar ||
Please feel free to email me [steinkn@ucmail.uc.edu] if you need help accessing anything.
Where platforms, power, and care collide 