Megan L. Zahay
Digital Cultures and Community
Platformization | Gender | Political Economy
Publications
Articles and Book Chapters
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.v10i4.5726
2020 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: 10.1177/1077699020954854
2020 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: 10.1080/17512786.2020.1722729
2019 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/
Reviews
2022 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: 10.1080/00335630.2022.2057421
Under Review
– 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.
Public 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.
Selected Awards and Honors
Weaver Excellence Award (2022)
Graduate School Fellow (2021)
William E. Elliot Dissertation Scholarship (2020)
Charles Chester Peace Scholarship (2020)
Helen K. Herman Memorial Fund Scholarship (2019)