Professional Summary
Krysten Stein, PhD (she/her), is a scholar of platform governance, creator economies, and digital care. Her research examines how contemporary media systems transform mental health, emotional labor, and therapeutic discourse into forms of visibility, value, and control. She is available for consulting, speaking engagements, workshops, and research collaborations on platform governance, creator economies, digital mental health, and trust and safety.
Grounded in feminist media and platform studies, her work investigates how platforms and media industries, including TikTok, reality television, and creator economies, shape labor, credibility, participation, and emotional life. She examines how algorithms, monetization systems, moderation practices, and visibility metrics structure everyday experiences under platform capitalism.
A central area of her scholarship focuses on mental health content online. She conceptualizes this broader media-cultural formation as theratainment, the convergence of therapeutic discourse and entertainment logics across contemporary media culture. Her work develops concepts including the care paradox, ambient caregiving, compulsory care labor, and trustwork to explain how care, credibility, and emotional labor operate under platform conditions.
Using qualitative and critical-cultural approaches, including interviews, discourse analysis, and digital ethnography, her scholarship bridges platform governance, creator economies, digital mental health, feminist media studies, and television and popular culture studies.
Her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Gender & Society, International Journal of Communication, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Convergence. Her first book, And How Does That Make You Feel? Theratainment and the Digital Commodification of Mental Health (under contract with the University of California Press), examines how platform power and visibility economies reshape care into cultural production.
Her research has been featured in CNN, Business Insider, and The Guardian. She is a Research Affiliate with the Intersectional Technology Lab and the Center on Digital Culture and Society, a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), Social Media Editor for Feminist Media Studies, an editorial board member for Creator & Influencer Studies, and a co-founder of the Content Creator Scholars Network.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College.
Education
Master of Arts: University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, Ohio, 2012 (Communication)
Bachelor of Arts: University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, Ohio, 2011 (Major: Communication Minors: Psychology, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies )
Graduate Certificate: University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, 2016 (Film and Media Studies )
PhD: University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, 2024 (Communication, Gender and Women's Studies, Black Studies)