My research examines how digital platforms govern care, labor, visibility, and participation, with particular attention to mental health, creator culture, and gendered and emotional labor. I argue that contemporary media systems increasingly transform care into forms of content, value, and control, a process I conceptualize as theratainment: the convergence of therapeutic discourse and entertainment within platformed environments.
Across projects, I analyze how platform rules, metrics, and monetization structures shape credibility, responsibility, and cultural production. I am particularly interested in how creators engage in ongoing trustwork to perform authenticity and care under algorithmic conditions, and how these dynamics reshape the boundaries between support, labor, governance, and visibility in digital culture.
Grounded in feminist media studies and qualitative methodologies, my work examines how power operates through everyday media practices, platform infrastructures, and systems of participation. Using ethnographic and qualitative approaches, I translate lived experience into insights that inform research, education, policy, and public discourse.
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
- Examines how digital platforms structure responsibility, accountability, and care through policies, algorithms, and monetization systems. This work focuses on how governance operates at the level of everyday experience, shaping how users navigate support, risk, and regulation in platformed environments.
- Theratainment and Mental Health Media
- Investigates how therapy, mental health discourse, and care practices are transformed into content, labor, and cultural production across social media platforms and reality television. This research foregrounds the political economy of care and the consequences of making mental health visible, monetizable, and algorithmically distributed.
- Creator Economies, Reality Television, and Media Industries
- Analyzes how visibility, authenticity, and credibility are produced and managed across influencer 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
- Employs ethnographic and qualitative methodologies to examine power, identity, labor, and governance in digital systems. This research advances feminist frameworks for understanding platform cultures and media industries, with an emphasis on lived experience, embodiment, and inequality.
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 