Professional Summary
Krysten Stein, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College whose research asks a central question: How do digital technologies transform media industries and everyday life? Drawing on television studies, feminist media studies, digital media studies, and critical media industry studies, she examines how creators, platforms, and emerging technologies reshape media production, labor, governance, expertise, commercialization, identity, and power across television, social media, and artificial intelligence. Organized around three interconnected areas of inquiry—creator economies and platform governance, digital mental health and the platformization of care, and artificial intelligence and media industries—her research demonstrates how emerging technologies extend and reorganize longstanding media-industrial logics rather than replace them.
Using critical-cultural and qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews, digital ethnography, discourse analysis, and feminist media methodologies, Stein examines how media industries organize labor, expertise, governance, visibility, identity, commercialization, and power. A central strand of her scholarship examines digital mental health as an emerging media industry. 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), develops the concept of theratainment to explain the convergence of therapeutic discourse and entertainment logics, in which emotional disclosure, self-work, healing, and mental health expertise become reorganized through platform economies, creator culture, algorithmic visibility, and audience engagement. Building on this work, her second book project examines AI therapy chatbots and digital mental health technologies as emerging media industries, investigating how AI-mediated care is designed, commercialized, governed, and experienced.
Her research has appeared in Gender & Society, International Journal of Communication, Feminist Media Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Convergence, and has informed public conversations through interviews and commentary for CNN, NBC News, Business Insider, The Guardian, and The Telegraph.
Stein is a 2026 Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), a Research Affiliate with the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania and the Intersectional Technology Lab at the University of Michigan. She also serves as Social Media Editor for Feminist Media Studies, an Editorial Board Member for Creator & Influencer Studies, a member of the Academic Advisory Circle of the American Influencer Council, and co-founder of the Content Creator Scholars Network.
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)