Peter Dahlgren will be visiting McGill in March 2008.

Much of Professor Dahlgren’s work pivots around notions of the public sphere and the democratic character of late modern society. He makes use of current strands of thought from contemporary social and cultural theory. In the past he performed qualitative studies of media output, particularly television journalism. More recently he has been engaged in doing in-depth interviews with people in their roles as citizens and as media audiences. Professor Dahlgren is especially interested in citizenship as a form of identity, and with the theme of a 'civic culture', both as an empirical and a normative referent, set in relation to the transformations of political life. He is generally interested in the rise of extra-parliamentarian initiatives and redefinitions of 'the political'.

The focus of Professor Dahlgren’s latest research has been to apply these perspectives to the Internet. Some Recent Publications Television and the Public Sphere: Citizenship, Democracy and the Media ( Sage, 1995). ”Narrative and meaning in TV news” in Mary Mander, ed., Framing Friction (University of Illinois Press, 1998). ”Meaning and/vs information in media studies” Society and Leisure, vol. 21, no.1, 1998. ”Politics of the self: women, citizenship and identity” in Erik Peurell, ed, The Interpretation of Culture and the Culture of Interpretation, forthcoming from Uppsala University Press. ”Enhancing the civic ideal in TV journalism” in K. Brants et al, eds. The Media in Question (Sage, 1997). ”Cultural studies and media research” in An International Handbook of Media Research, eds. J.Corner, P.Schlesinger, R.Silverstone (Routledge, 1997). ”Interface in cyberspace: the repostitioning of journalism and its publics” in Javnost/The Public (Slovenia) vol. 3 (3) 1996.