Research

Chris Peters is Professor and Co-Founder/Director of the Centre for Digital Citizenship at Roskilde University, Denmark working at the intersections of communication, digital society, and audience research. He is also Principal Investigator of ‘Beyond the Here and Now of News’, a project funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

Peters is trained as a media sociologist, and his work interweaves insights from social theory with the fields of journalism studies, political communication, audience and reception stuides, and visual communication. In recent years, his primary interest has been focusing on the changing experiences, conceptions, and uses of news and information in the contemporary digital age. Peters considers how people combine emerging media forms and technologies in different informational repertoires to communicate in everyday life and analyzes what this means for the ways people gain knowledge about public affairs. In tandem, he weighs this against the shifting media landscape and how it forces social and political institutions to reconsider their approaches.

Peters is the editor of six books and special issues, including Rethinking Journalism and Rethinking Journalism Again (Routledge, 2013 & 2016, both with Marcel Broersma), ‘The Places and Spaces of News Audiences’ (Journalism Studies, 2015), and ‘Conceptualizing Change in Journalism Studies’ (Journalism, 2019, with Matt Carlson). He is currently working on The Visual Citizen (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, with Stuart Allan). His work has also appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals and edited collections. Peters sits on the editorial boards of the international academic journals Journalism, Journalism Studies, and Journalism Practice.

Specialities: Media, journalism, and audience studies, with a broad awareness of sociology and communications theory.