The UCPH team pools the expertise at the Centre for Modern European Studies (CEMES) and the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication (MEF). CEMES has a long record of interdisciplinary collaboration and coordinates research and teaching in the broader field of European Studies including Sociology, Media Studies, Philosophy and Rhetoric, History, European Ethnology and Modern Cultural Studies. MEF specialises in the relationship between society, culture and media institutions. Research at MEF is theoretically and methodologically advanced enough to investigate media production, communication and reception and the impact of old and new media on accelerated social change and democratic politics.

The UCPH team brings unique competences in the field of European integration, comparative media studies, social media and ethnographic research with expertise in campaigning, political mobilisation and public opinion formation. The team uses mixed-methods and has developed advanced methodological skills in ethnographic research, quantitative and qualitative data collection and text/discourse analysis following a claims-making approach, in mapping political discourse and public opinion through news media. The team has developed methodological skills in analysing civil society solidarity action and citizen participation in the field of immigration and asylum. It has also developed methodological tools in the field of social media research. This includes, in particular, a study on social media’s moral spectatorship in response to the so-called refugee crisis and a large comparative survey on Euroscepticism and the role of media negativity in framing EU politics. Members of the team have worked on mobility practices of EU citizens from crisis-affected countries, on migration and multiculturalism in different national and regional contexts and on grassroots mobilisation of transnational solidarity in Europe.

Team members

Anne Mette Thorhauge is the principal investigator of the Danish team. She is associate professor at Center for Tracking and Society, Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen. Her research interests include digital media in everyday life including gaming as social interaction and source of conflict in modern families. Her current research concerns critical analyses of digital platform economies in the domain of gaming. Anne Mette Thorhauge has chaired the Danish Media council for children and young people (2013-2019) and as part of this work she has contributed to the anchoring of media policies in the UN convention of the child, emphasizing children’s right to protection but also their rights as democratic citizens. She has continued this work as a board member in CFDP, center for digital pedagogics. In parallel with these activities Anne Mette Thorhauge has participated in the development of the Danish computer game industry and is currently chair of the Steering committee of DADIU – the Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment.

Hans-Jörg Trenz is professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa/Florence), research professor at ARENA, Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo and guest researcher at the University of Copenhagen. Until 2021, he was professor in Modern European Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen. He received his PhD from the European University Institute Florence and obtained his habilitation from the Humboldt University Berlin. His research focuses on European public sphere, European civil society, citizenship and democracy and transnational mobilization and protest. In recent projects, he deals with the challenges to European socio-political space examining both societal responses to the global crisis and changing citizens’ allegiances and loyalties in light of the macroeconomic and politico-legal shift. As part of a Horizon project on EU differentiated integration, dominance and democracy (EU3D). Trenz also coordinates a cross-country comparison of public perceptions and experiences of EU differentiated integration of key actors (citizens, media, parliaments, sub-national levels) and how they shape conditions for EU reforms.

Anne Brus holds a PhD in Humanities from Roskilde University. Currently, she is working as a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication. She has developed several programmes on the theory of science, and qualitative and quantitative methods. She has been a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media, London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, University of London, England (2011), and visiting researcher at the HEMIL-centre at Bergen University, Norway (2018). Anne is the author and co-author of nine peer reviewed articles and a writer of several reports within the field of sociology of childhood, digital literacy, health promotion, computer games from an everyday life perspective, and computer game policy. Throughout all her research, she has shown a consistent dedication toward including a child- and young people’s perspectives in her field of research. At the moment, she is finishing her postdoc-project on ‘Computer game policy in Denmark and Norway’, and preparing her new postdoc research on ‘children and young people’s participation in e-sport in Danish sport clubs.