Dr. Boxman-Shabtai (PhD, Northwestern University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research examines meaning-making at the intersection of media producers, texts, and audiences. Placing a special emphasis on the phenomenon of polysemy (meaning multiplicity), her studies explore questions like: Why do we interpret the same content in diverging, at times contrasting, ways? What makes media messages open to different interpretations? How do users exploit the features of social media platforms to articulate their own point of views? How can communication researchers probe texts systematically while taking their polysemy into account? Her work, published in top journals in Communication Studies (e.g., Journal of Communication, New Media and Society, and Information, Communication and Society) examined these questions in the context of TikTok use across conflicting sides during the Israel-Hamas war, protest and media criticism, the journalistic coverage of income inequality and corporate social responsibility, and humor and parody in user-generated-content.