Yena Lee, Ph.D.

Yena Lee (she/they) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society. Her research on social movements, creator culture, and fan activism examines how unorganized actors gain and translate influence into political power.

Yena Lee (she/they) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society. She holds a Ph.D. in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern School of Communication. 

Yena’s 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? These questions anchor her broader research agenda, which examines the shifting dynamics of influence and power across digital platforms, issue areas, and national contexts, including South Korea, the United States, and Brazil. Her work on networked feminist leadership and K-pop fan activism has been published in Information, Communication & Society and the International Journal of Communication. 

Yena’s 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.