Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova


Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool, UK. Dr. Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at the University of Liverpool, UK. Vera joined the University of Liverpool in September 2017 after having worked at the University of Chester and the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Her undergraduate degree is in Journalism and Mass Communication from the American University in Bulgaria and her MA is in the European Union: Media, Politics and Society from the University of East Anglia.

DJRG Fellow, March 2020

She completed her PhD in the Social Sciences at Loughborough University in 2011. Her PhD thesis was about Children, Europe and the media. Vera is the author of Russia’s Liberal Media: Handcuffed but Free (Routledge, 2018) and Global Journalism: An Introduction (Palgrave, 2018; with Professor Michael Bromley, Sheffield University). Vera sits on the Executive Committee of the Worlds of Journalism study – a ground-breaking academic project assessing the state of journalism in 67 countries in the second wave (2012-2016), and 110 countries in the forthcoming third wave (2020-2022). Vera is also Regional Coordinator for Central and Eastern Europe, and Chair of the Journalists’ Safety Working Group. She is Book Review Editor of the European Journal of Communication.

Vera’s research areas are: 1. Global and international journalism with a focus on Russia and Eastern Europe. 2. Children, young people and the media. 3. Nationalism, banal Europeanism and the media. 4. The Internet’s role in relation to: a) risks and opportunities for young people, and b) democratic deliberative potential with a focus on online comments. Vera has published her research in leading journals in the field such as Ethnicities; Information, Communication & Society; International Journal of Press/Politics; International Journal of Communication; Journalism; Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly; Journal of Children and Media; Journalism Studies; and YOUNG. Vera previously worked as European editor for the second biggest-selling newspaper in Bulgaria – 24 Chasa.

Title and abstract

The Social Construction of Journalism Studies

Twenty years ago, within months of each other in early 2000, two new journals – Journalism Studies and Journalism – published their first issue. The field of journalism studies, integrated with but distinct from those of mass communication and media sociology, had been born.

Like all disciplines, of course, it was born into a specific cultural time and intellectual space. Journalism studies offers a particular social construction of what constitutes journalism – its institutions and social structures, the forces that legitimate (and de-legitimate) it, and the activities through which its products, practitioners and processes are constructed. In her presentation, Dr. Singer proposes to explore the overlapping sociological, normative and technological forces that have shaped the social construction of journalism studies as a distinct academic discipline. These forces collectively define the questions that scholars raise, the methods they bring to bear, and the answers they collectively validate.

Selected publications