Megan L. Zahay, PhD
Megan is a scholar of digital rhetoric studying authenticity and community in the era of platformization.
Research
Publications
2024 Zahay, Megan L. “God’s Warriors: Gunlore and Identity in the Vernacular Discourse of a Survivalist Community.” Gunlore: American Traditions About Firearms
Eds. Robert Glenn Howard and Eric Eliason. University Press of Mississippi.2023 Howard, Robert G., and Megan L. Zahay. “From the Television Age to the Digital Revolution.”
The Oxford Handbook of Christian Fundamentalism
Eds. Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), 643-659.2022 Zahay, Megan L. “What ‘Real’ Women Want: Alt-Right Femininity Vlogs as an Anti- Feminist Populist Aesthetic.”
Media and Communication, 10(4). doi: 10.17645/mac.v10i4.57262020 Zahay, Megan L., Kelly Jensen, Yiping Xia, and Susan Robinson. “The Labor of Building Trust: Traditional and
Engagement Discourses for Practicing Journalism in a Digital Age.”
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 98(4), 1041-1058. doi: 10.1177/10776990209548542020 Xia, Yiping, Susan Robinson, Megan Zahay, and Deen Freelon. “The Evolving Journalistic Roles on Social Media:
Exploring ‘Engagement’ as Relationship-Building Between Journalists and Citizens.”
Journalism Practice, 14(5), 556-573. doi: 10.1080/17512786.2020.17227292019 Robinson, Susan, Yiping Xia, and Megan Zahay. “Public Political Talk on Twitter and Facebook: The View from
Journalists.”
Knight Foundation Report. URL: https://knightfoundation.org/reports/public-political-talk-on-twitter-and-
facebook-the-view-from-journalists/Reviews2022 Zahay, Megan L. “Book Review: Rebirthing a Nation: White Women, Identity Politics, and the Internet
by Wendy K. Z. Anderson.”
Quarterly Journal of Speech, 108(2), 227-230. doi: 10.1080/00335630.2022.2057421Public Scholarship and Media Mentions
2024 (July 10) "'The Work is Never Done': 30 Traditional Wives From the 20th Century Share Their Real Experiences."
BoredPanda.com. Interviewed for expertise on trad wives digital community.2024 (March 27) Interviewed by journalist Juno Kelly for UK consumer insights firm Canvas 8 for expertise on trad
wives digital community.2021 (February 11) "A selection of readings on journalism – for journalists."
The Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford
Included Zahay et al., The labor of building trust (2020) on their updated list.
URL: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/selection-readings-journalism-journalists.2020 (August 31) "Conspiracy theories in the age of social media."
Digital Doxa Blog.
URL: https://www.digitaldoxa.org/post/conspiracy-theories-in-the-age-of-social-media-megan-l-zahay.2020 (October 8) "Journalism faces a crisis in trust. Journalists fall into two very different camps for how to fix it."
Nieman Lab.
URL: https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/journalism-faces-a-crisis-in-trust-journalists-fall-into-two-very-
different-camps-for-how-to-fix-it/.Selected Presentations
2022 Alt-wives: Polysemic politics and gendered populism among trad wife influencers.
Rhetoric Society of America, Baltimore, MD.2022 Chronos and kairos on the digital homestead: Performing ‘the past’ with and against new media.
UW-Madison Rhetoric Society of America Student Chapter Spring Symposium, Madison, WI.2021 Constructing digital whiteness: The linking rhetoric of white femininity on The Better Mom and White Date.
National Communication Association, Seattle, WA.2021 Becoming Q’s digital patriots: How QAnon participants learned to theorize conspiracy theories.
National Communication Association, Seattle, WA.2021 White supremacy, white memory: Gender and the nation on WhiteDate.net.
UW-Madison Rhetoric Society of America Student Chapter Spring Symposium, Madison, WI.2020 Making dough: Negotiating evangelical motherhood and neoliberalism in TheBetterMom.com.
National Communication Association, Online (Due to COVID-19).2019 Rhetoric and economic theology: Communication for survival under neoliberalism.
Musgrave, K., M. L. Zahay, R. W. Greene, J. Hanan, C. Chaput, & C. Colombini.
National Communication Association, Baltimore, MD.2019 Church and (deep) state: Imagining religious citizenship through online conspiracy discourse.
National Communication Association, Baltimore, MD.2019 The labor of journalistic trust in a digital age: Rhetorical transformations in doing journalism.
Zahay, M. L., & K. Jensen (formerly Nelson), Y. Xia, & S. Robinson.
International Communication Association, Washington, D.C.2019 Forbidden fruit: “Sophistry” and the irreconcilable contingent.
UW-Madison Rhetoric Society of America Student Chapter Spring Symposium, Madison, WI.2018 The neoliberal apocalyptic: Rhetoric of theodicy and salvation in Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat.
National Communication Association, Salt Lake City, UT.2018 “Make America Great Again, in Jesus’ name”: Apocalyptic deliberation on YouTube in the 2016 election.
International Society for Media, Religion, and Culture, Boulder, CO.
About
Zahay's research investigates how the identity construction affordances of platforms enable online communities to mainstream outsider political messages and build trust with one another as well as the broader public. She has worked across a range of vernacular communities and institutional actors seeking to strengthen relationships online, including influencers and content creators, professional journalists, religious groups, and conspiracy theorists.She takes a digital ethnographic approach while attending to the way economic conditions, and particularly the context of platformization, shape and constrain the discursive resources of online communities. Her work has shown that while institutional actors often attempt to increase trust by doubling down on professional norms, everyday users employ the expression of identity and its perceived authenticity as a marker of trustworthiness, belonging, and credibility.Zahay’s dissertation, titled “The Authenticity Economy: Rhetorics of Platformization and Social Change in Online Communities,” develops a theoretical framework of platform rhetorics which foregrounds the affective circulation of monetization logics. It investigates in three case studies – Booktubers, knitters, and homesteaders – how the communities that form around YouTube influencers negotiate tensions that arise between the imperatives of content monetization and the ideal of community values. She argues that users employ authenticity discourse to establish shared community values outside the system of valuation defined by platform content monetization.Her work appears in Media and Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism Practice, and two edited collections. She has presented her research at the National Communication Association, Association of Internet Researchers, Rhetoric Society of America, International Communication Association, and International Society for the Study of Media, Religion, and Culture.She is currently an Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication at Purchase College, SUNY. Previously, she earned her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Department of Communication Arts in 2024.
Teaching
Department of Communications, Purchase College, SUNYPlatforming Justice
Public Communication Campaigns
Introduction to Media Writing
Strategic Message Design
Senior Capstone
Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-MadisonIntroduction to Digital Communication
Introduction to Digital Media Production
Communication and Human Behavior
Environmental Communication
Introduction to Speech Composition (Public Speaking)
Religious Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-MadisonRhetoric of Religion
Religion in Sickness and Health (Introductory Religious Studies)