This page offers an overview of my research program. For a complete record of publications, presentations, teaching, and service, please see my full CV and Google Scholar profile below.
- Creator Economies and Platform Governance
- I investigate how creators, platforms, and audiences negotiate visibility, authenticity, credibility, and influence across contemporary media industries. This work examines creator labor, commercialization, platform governance, content moderation, and the changing relationships among creators, audiences, media institutions, and digital platforms.
- Digital Mental Health and the Platformization of Care
- A central strand of my research examines digital mental health as an emerging media industry. Through concepts including theratainment, the care paradox, ambient caregiving, compulsory care labor, and trustwork, I examine how therapeutic discourse, expertise, and care become forms of media production, labor, commercialization, and governance across television, social media, and digital platforms.
- Artificial Intelligence and Media Industries
- Building on my research on creator economies and digital mental health, I examine artificial intelligence as a site of media-industrial transformation. My current work investigates AI therapy chatbots and digital mental health technologies, examining how these platforms are designed, commercialized, and governed; the political economy of AI-mediated care; and how people experience and make sense of AI in everyday life.
- Critical-Cultural and Qualitative Methods
- Using critical-cultural and qualitative approaches, including in-depth interviews, digital ethnography, discourse analysis, and feminist media methodologies, I examine how media industries organize labor, expertise, governance, visibility, identity, commercialization, and power.
Conceptual Contributions
- Theratainment explains the media-cultural formation through which therapeutic discourse is reorganized around visibility, affect, engagement, and entertainment logics, transforming care into a site of media production, labor, governance, and commercialization.
- The Care Paradox explains the structural contradiction in which care becomes increasingly visible, culturally valued, and publicly demanded while the material infrastructures necessary to sustain it continue to erode.
- Ambient Caregiving describes the platform condition through which therapeutic discourse circulates continuously across digital media, making care appear persistently available through everyday practices of scrolling, visibility, and engagement.
- Trustwork conceptualizes the ongoing labor required to establish, maintain, and negotiate expertise and credibility within platformed media environments shaped by algorithms, moderation systems, and audience expectations.
- Compulsory Care Labor explains how emotional support, responsiveness, and relational availability become expected forms of labor required for visibility, legitimacy, and participation within creator economies and platformed media environments.
Research Affiliations
- Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), Bochum, Germany Center on Digital
- Culture and Society, University of Pennsylvania
- Intersectional Technology Lab, University of Michigan
- Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, 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.
media industries in a digital age 