New Postdoctoral Fellow to Join the Center on Digital Culture and Society for 2025-26
Yena Lee will join the Annenberg School in Fall 2025.
The Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS) announced today that Yena Lee, Ph.D, will join the Annenberg School for Communication in the Fall 2025 semester as its postdoctoral fellow. Lee was chosen from a large pool of applicants from around the world.
Lee earned her Ph.D. in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern School of Communication. Her research spans networked social movements, creator culture, and fan activism, unified by two central questions: How do unorganized actors become influential, and under what conditions does that influence translate into political power?
Her current book project, “Creator Logic-in-Practice: Political Content Creators and the Negotiation of Influence in the Post-Networked Era,” theorizes how creators navigate a fragmented media environment increasingly governed by algorithmic attention rather than social networks — shifting the analytic focus from abstract notions of agency to the reflexive labor involved in negotiating influence under platform capitalism.
Lee’s work on networked feminist leadership and K-pop fan activism has been published in Information, Communication & Society and the International Journal of Communication.
Lee joins current CDCS Postdoctoral Fellow Lucy March, whose research examines internet cultures, popular music, and identity representation in popular media.
