What do My Little Pony fans, toy unboxing videos and ‘90s child sitcoms have in common? Kyra Hunting does research on all of these things. 

Hunting is an assistant professor of media arts and studies in the School of Journalism and Media teaching classes such as media criticism and children in the media. The latter comes at no surprise as much of Hunting’s research focuses on children’s entertainment media and the intersections across gender, fashion and a wide array of other subsets. Hunting also considers herself a fan studies scholar, meaning she studies fandom and fan behavior around media. 

“There's a lot of fan scholarship but there's basically no fan scholarship about children,” Hunting said.

But, she is working to change that. Hunting said her work aims to include fandom around children’s social media and go beyond the traditional research that studies the educational value of children’s media. 

“I really want to focus on children's media as cultural artifacts and as art,” Hunting said. 

Hunting said that her research, and much of the work done in children’s media fandom studies, aim to destigmatize the shame and baggage that comes with enjoying children’s media as an adult, such as her research on “Bronies”, adult male fans of My Little Pony. She also said that she hopes to focus much of her research on some of the children’s media that may not have gotten much attention in past research. 

“There's so much more content that gets overlooked in the children's media space, and so I think I started to realize that the way we were looking at content erased whole parts of cultural art,” Hunting said. “We have a taste culture that treats [children’s media] as less than and then because we as adults assume that they're lower taste or less value, they don't tend to get this sort of close artistic or cultural analysis that we would give texts that are marked as adult. 20 years ago a Marvel Cinematic Universe film would have been considered a children's film and now we've decided that, as a culture, they've reached a level of economic value profitability that they're considered adult films now that has come with a massive amount of research of the cinematography, the authors, production contacts and the gender representations, and so I really want to bring that energy to children's media.”

Beyond combatting this taste culture, Hunting said that her research has helped her to realize just how nuanced media can be. 

“Usually, the truth is infinitely more multiple and nuanced and messy than we want it to be, and I think that's kind of the exciting thing about research. When you actually start spending time with audiences, it's usually much more conflicted and messy than whatever one expects it to be,” Hunting said.

However, Hunting said she could not do this kind of research alone, because much of the research in the communications fields is interconnected with other subjects.

“I wish people understood that it is very often deeply interdisciplinary. I think a lot of people think of it as professional research, like market research. Obviously, professional research is something that people do and is incredibly important but there's also a lot of social science research and there's also a lot of humanities style research, historical research, sociological research, ethnography and technology research. That fact is what makes communications an interesting discipline is its ability to bring together all of these orientations and methods,” Hunting said.