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. Across projects, I analyze how platform rules, metrics, and monetization structures shape credibility, responsibility, and cultural production in contemporary media systems. This page offers an overview of my research program and ongoing projects. For a complete record of publications, talks, 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, with particular attention to how governance shapes everyday experiences of support, risk, and regulation.
- 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, foregrounding the political economy of care.
- 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, with a focus on labor, performance, and value.
- Feminist and Qualitative Approaches to Platform Studies: Employs ethnographic and qualitative methodologies to study power, identity, labor, and governance in digital systems, advancing feminist frameworks for understanding platform cultures and media industries.
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 