Jhertau Her.

Education:

Cognitive Science Graduate (B.S.) from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Awards and Honors:

College Service Award (2026)
Honors in the Major

Research Focuses:

Online communities (fandoms, transnational)
International Relations (Policy, taskforce creation and maintence)
Response to emerging technologies (AI, social media ecosystems, deepfakes)

Publications

Ringland, K. E., Seetharaman, B., Her, J., Tan, A., Larsen, B. A., Mendoza, L., & Carstensdottir, E. (2026, April). “To be that one other brick in the pillar”: Online Communities, Platforms, and Collective Action in the BTS Industrial Complex. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-24).
Her, J., & Ringland, K. E. (2025, April). Mitigating Deepfake Harm in Online Communities: Insights from the BTS ARMY Fandom. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-6).

Provided feedback on:

Ringland, K. E., Carstensdottir, E., Tung, M., Seetharaman, B., Eagle, T., Baltaxe-Admony, L. B., & Weatherwax, K. (2024). Together in the Mikrokosmos: Exploring disabled embodied experiences in designed sociotechnical worlds. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(CSCW2), 1-39.

Presentations

Popular Culture Association Conference 2026 (Atlanta, GA, USA)

_Shout Out to ARMY All Over the World__ The Creation of Informal Digital Diplomacy in Everyday Fandom Spaces (PCA 2026).pdf

Popular Culture Association Conference 2024 (Chicago, IL, USA)

Narrative, Identity, and Play in the BTS ARMY Fandom (PCA 2024).pdf

Understanding Fandom Community Safety Practice through BTS ARMYs Response to Celebrity Deepfakes (PCA 2024).pdf

Science Communication

Podcast by ARMY is a collaborative project with Dr. Kathryn E. Ringland of the University of California, Santa Cruz to discuss BTS ARMY (the fandom of the K-pop supergroup BTS) through an academic lens informed by acessibility, fan studies, and ethnographic work. The current podcast has 47 episodes covering a variety of topics from the political to social to personal, providing an in-depth dive into the fandom.

Produced by Jhertau Her.

Editing, audio, and graphics by Jhertau Her.

Co-hosted by Dr. Kathryn E. Ringland and Jhertau Her.

Jhertau Her's personal Medium blog discusses her journey studying abroad, years as an undergraduate student at UCSC, fandom, and international relations relating to Korea and the United States.

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