Dr Matthias Revers

Profile

I joined the University of Leeds in January 2018. Before that I was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Frankfurt and Department of Sociology at the University of Graz. I obtained my PhD in sociology from the State University of New York in Albany (SUNY-Albany) in 2014, where I focused on cultural sociology and social theory. I’m a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University and a former Fulbright scholar.

Research interests

Polarization and Political Communication
My research explores political polarization as both a structural condition of democratic life and a lived social reality. At its core is a concern with how political conflict is performed, contested, and experienced—both in public discourse and in interpersonal relationships. I conceptualize this through the lens of performative polarization, a term I use to describe how public displays of antagonism shape affective boundaries and influence social interaction (Revers, 2023). This has led to a growing interest in micropolarization—how political divisions permeate everyday interactions, including among friends, families, and strangers.
As co-lead of Working Group 1 in the COST Action Redressing Radical Polarisation (CA22165), I contribute to the network’s conceptual and theoretical agenda. This work aims to synthesise and advance European approaches to polarization research by developing a more comparative and culturally embedded understanding of affective conflict. It has resulted in two working papers: “Affect and Meaning: A Cultural Sociological Perspective on Polarization” (with Werner Binder, Maria Luengo-Cruz, and Marcus Morgan), and “Hybrid Media and the Polarization of Civil Society: Elite Polarization Beyond Political Institutions” (with Maria Luengo-Cruz and Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk). These contributions develop a perspective on polarization as a meaning-making process shaped by symbolic boundaries, media environments, and emotional repertoires. The COST network also serves as an important platform for cross-national dialogue on the relationship between political antagonism and democratic resilience.
My work on micropolarization began with a collaborative study (Revers and Coleman, 2025) of interpersonal conflict during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on interviews in the UK and Germany, we examined political estrangement within families and the communicative dynamics around vaccine opposition and protest. Building on this, one current project DEPOLCLIMATE (with Lone Sørensen, University of Leeds, and Michael Brüggemann, University of Hamburg) investigates how depolarization can be fostered in discussions about climate politics. Based on 60 unmoderated dyadic conversations across political lines, the project explores how disagreement, knowledge-building, and conversational practices interact in shaping de/polarization.
A new strand of research within the POLARIS project (Polarization in Online Landscapes and Radical Influence Studies) investigates how the New Right mobilizes affective polarization through TikTok. Working with Hendrik Meyer and Lasse Rodeck (University of Hamburg) and Julia Niemann-Lenz (DZHW), our first study focuses on the EU parliamentary election campaign, examining how AfD politicians construct antagonistic narratives for their TikTok audiences. A first working paper is under review (Meyer et al., 2025). Ongoing research extends this framework to the 2025 German federal election, with a comparative study of TikTok content and audience responses across all major political parties.
A parallel strand of my research examines the moral boundaries of speech, particularly in relation to academic freedom and freedom of expression. This work (Revers and Traunmüller, 2020; Traunmüller and Revers, 2020; Villa, Traunmüller and Revers, 2021) has addressed contentious debates in German universities and contributed to a broader public conversation on open discourse. It also sparked an ongoing collaboration with colleagues at LMU Munich (Alex Wuttke), the University of Mannheim (Richard Traunmüller, and the University of Konstanz (Claudia Diehl, Nils Weidmann) to develop a more representative and methodologically rigorous survey of speech norms and viewpoint tolerance at German universities.
Together, these projects combine qualitative, quantitative, computational, and conceptual approaches to understanding polarization—from institutional and ideological dynamics to the granular level of interpersonal communication. They are united by a commitment to interdisciplinary research and a reflexive orientation to the role of communication in democratic life.

Digital Journalism
In my ethnography of political reporting I examined the digital transformation of journalism in the United States, focusing specifically on Twitter. This research deals with digital journalism and transformations of professional norms (Revers 2014), the reorganisation of spatial and temporal dimensions of news reporting (Revers 2015) and the event-drivenness of technological adoption (Revers 2017).

Comparative Media Research
My book Contemporary Journalism in the US and Germany (Revers 2017) combined cultural sociology and field theory to study the news profession in Germany and the US. In this first systematic cross-nationally comparative news ethnography, I show that professional authority of journalism requires continuous maintenance and care through performance and boundary work. One of the findings is that German journalism—despite stronger ideological self-conceptions—values professional autonomy just as much as its US counterpart, which is taken (or rather: sees itself) as the epitome for this normative commitment.

Qualifications

• PhD Sociology
• MA Sociology
• BA Sociology

Professional memberships

• ASA
• ICA
• BSA
• Editorial board Cultural Sociology

Student education

I am teaching in the areas in the areas history of communication, political communication and PGR training at the School of Media and Communication.

Research groups and institutes

• Journalism
• Media Industries and Cultural Production
• Political Communication

Current postgraduate researchers

• Ariadna Obregón
• Danilo Reuben-Matamoros