Roxana Muenster
Graduate Student, Grad Rep, Department of Communication

Roxana Mika Muenster is a graduate student in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where she researches lifestyle politics, digital social movements, and conspiracy. She is particularly interested in how politics creep into ostensibly nonpolitical culture and lifestyle topics, and the role this plays in how ideology is disseminated. Her current research examines the relationship between health and political ideology on social media and e-commerce platforms; alternative social media platforms; and the ‘tradwife’ movement.
Roxana’s commentary has appeared in the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. She has a background in journalism, including as the Marjorie Deane fellow at The Economist, and was a COMPASS tech and media policy fellow at the Brookings Institution. She holds an MSc in Politics & Communication at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA in Communication and English Linguistics from the Freie Universität Berlin. She is a graduate affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina.
Education
- MSc Politics & Communication, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2021
- BA, Communications Studies and English Literature and Linguistics, Free University of Berlin, 2020
Interests
Digital and political communication, social movements, lifestyle politics, alternative health
Awards & Honors
- Cornell Fellowship
- Fall 2024 Democracy Fellow with the Center on Global Democracy
- Omapang, A., Green, B., Yu, Ch., Muenster, R., & Margolin, D. (2025) Time to politicization: The emergence and effects of politics on science YouTube videos. Journal of Information Technology & Politics. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2025.2486054
- Muenster, R. M. (2025). Capturing news, capturing democracy: Trump and the Voice of America by Wright et al. Cultural Studies, 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2025.2467726
- Muenster, R. M. & Foster, M. E. (2025) Breadwinner or breadmaker: Contradictions in tradwives’ creator labor, religious vernacular, and aesthetics. AoIR Selected Pa- pers of Internet Research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2024i0.14008
- Bera, S.*, Vilchez, A.*, & Muenster, R. M.* (2025). The persistent global disparities in environmental and climate communication scholarship. Frontiers in Environmental Communication, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1474619
- Muenster, R. M., Gangi, K., & Margolin, D. (2024). Alternative health and conventional medicine discourse about cancer on TikTok: Computer vision analysis of TikTok videos. JMIR, 26. https://doi.org/10.2196/60283
- Muenster, R. M. (July 22, 2024). Project 2025: What a second Trump term could mean for media and technology policies. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/project-2025-what-a-second-trump-term-could-mean-for-media-and-technology-policies/
- Wright, L., Muenster, R. M., Vecchione, B., Qu, T., Cai, S., Smith, A., Metcalf, J., Matias, N. M. (2024). Null Compliance: NYC Local Law 144 and the Challenges of Algorithmic Accountability. J. ACM, 37(4), 111. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3630106.3658998
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