Book Project
Political as Content: Political Content Creators and Post-networked Influence
In today’s media environment characterized by algorithmically governed platforms like TikTok, publics are no longer primarily organized through social networks that have defined earlier platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Instead, visibility is increasingly allocated by algorithmic predictions of what will capture attention in the moment. Drawing on a year-long digital ethnography on TikTok and interviews with progressive political content creators and communications strategists, this book project investigates how influence is enacted and translated into political power in what Lee conceptualizes as the post-networked era—where networks still exist but their organizing force is eclipsed by opaque algorithmic platform infrastructures.
Extending Bourdieu’s logic of practice, Lee introduces the framework of creator logic-in-practice, treating creators as fielded actors whose practices take shape in relation to one another while contending with constantly evolving and overlapping forces of algorithmic pressures, political opportunity structures, and commercial imperatives. Beginning with the structural focus on the interstitial field of social media production, where attention capital has become the dominant force, the analysis moves inward to examine how creators navigate the field demands that often come into conflict with the political ethos driving their work. Finally, it expands outward to explore the friction that arises when creators attempt to become movement actors across grassroots and institutional politics. In doing so, this book project reveals new ways of thinking about influence, power, and political possibility in a landscape where attention economies are fundamentally reconfiguring American political life.
Lee, Y. (2025, September 29). Creator logic-in-practice: Political content creators and the negotiation of influence in the post-networked era [Colloquium]. CDCS Colloquium, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania. https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/events/cdcs-colloquium-yena-lee
K-pop fandom activism
Counterpublic research highlights the significance of counter-discourse in challenging dominant public spheres. Yet, less focus has been given to how counterpublic actors could destabilize the relationships within a dominant public to foster counter-discourse. I examine the creation of a feminist counterpublic within Twitter K-pop fandom to understand how oppositional actors can transform the toxic technocultures of the dominant public to create a counterpublic. Formed by feminist K-pop fans, this counterpublic defied toxic relational norms of the mainstream K-pop fandom, cultivating a culture where fans could critique problematic K-pop star text without renouncing their fan identity. I bring the concepts of relational schemas and scripts to the study of counterpublics to demonstrate how creating an alternative schema can be a tool of resistance. To do so, I highlight how feminist fans reappropriated existing relationship scripts and formulated new ones to modify the relational schema of the mainstream K-pop fandom. I argue that these relational strategies helped feminist fans regroup by creating opportunities for productive coexistence, facilitating an alternative relational schema around a critical fan identity.
Lee, Y. (2023). Toward Productive Coexistence: A Relational Analysis of a Feminist Counterpublic in Twitter K-Pop Fandom. International Journal of Communication; Vol 17 (2023). https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/20439
In the news: The dark side of K-pop’s global success: How bullying and death threats gripped fandoms. The Independent. October 2026.
Networked social movements
With recent research emphasizing different leadership roles that characterize networked social movements, brokerage has received renewed attention as one of the key responsibilities of networked movement leadership. However, in limiting the role of brokering to creating horizontal connections among decentralized actors, previous research is missing an account of grassroots movements that were able to make vertical connections with the power structures and grow to have a significant political impact. By comparing two cases of feminist networked social movements from South Korea, I examine brokerage and conditions that enabled brokerage through the lens of leadership. I argue that brokerage is a crucial dimension of movement leadership and propose the concept of meso-level leadership to elaborate how some grassroots leaders could facilitate grassroots representation in mainstream legislative agenda-setting by forming relationships with actors across a broad organizational and institutional spectrum.
Lee, Y. (2023). Meso-level leaders as brokers of horizontal and vertical linkages in feminist networked social movements. Information, Communication & Society, 26(10), 2015–2032. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2065212
When scholars write about social media activism, they typically concern themselves with activism conducted via the social media platforms of Twitter and Facebook. This is with good reason: Twitter and Facebook are the primary platforms on which politics are discussed and debated, and social movement activity is organized. However, as the Movement for Black Lives reached mass circulation over the summer of 2020 in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, Instagram became an unlikely site of much activism. Though Instagram has historically been notably apolitical in its content, the summer of 2020 saw new kinds of content dominate the platform—content that brought the Movement for Black Lives into the feeds of millions of users. This paper investigates how this political social movement content came to dominate a platform that typically resists political conversation. Bringing together the literatures on social media activism and on platform logics, we propose a new concept of “accountability activism.” This concept encapsulates how activists adapted political information for circulation on Instagram by molding it in particular ways that suited the platform’s unique logics. Drawing on a multiphase ethnographically-informed content analysis of Instagram posts shared between June and December 2020, we illustrate “accountability activism” in practice, advancing our understanding of the complex and contingent relationship between platform logics and social media activism.
Lee, Y., Billard, T. J. (2024, June 20). Movement for Black Lives through the Platform Logics of Instagram [Conference presentation]. International Association Conference (ICA) Preconference: Reimagining Digital Activism: Navigating Complexities and Forging New Perspectives. Gold Coast, Australia.
Qualitative methods
Qualitative communication research is in a sorry state, frequently organized around quantitative aims of decontextualized “generalizability” and “theory testing.” We first present a diagnosis of this problem, identifying both causes and consequences of the field’s current approach to qualitative research. Second, we propose robust methodological solutions, first reorienting the logic of qualitative research, presenting Peircean abduction as an alternative to the false deductive/inductive binary of Popperian social science, and introducing the extended case method as a supplement to grounded theory approaches to qualitative theorizing. Next, we present three standards of rigor for qualitative research not modeled on quantitative ones: groundedness, interpretive validity, and theoretical imagination. From there, we outline the general research process of qualitative fieldwork and discuss the analytic process of moving from grounded cases to general theory. Finally, we conclude with a brief meditation on the future of qualitative research in the field of communication.
Billard, T.J., & Lee, Y. (2025, June 16) Once more, With Fieldwork: Rebuilding Qualitative Methods in Communication Research from the Ground Up. [Conference presentation]. International Association Conference (ICA): Disrupting and Consolidating Communication Research. Denver, United States.
