Estella Porras

Professor Porras teaches several courses in the Journalism and Media Studies Concentration of HCOM and oversights the Mass Media Internships courses. Particularly she teaches Reporting, Global Communication and Culture, Community Journalism Studies, Media for Social Change, and Media Production Lab, among other courses.

Regarding her area of academic inquiry, Dr. Porras is interested in exploring ways in which media (particularly news media) facilitate participation and community engagement in social change. She has done international research involving the practice of communicators and community journalists. The new challenges of journalism and the opportunities that media technologies offer to engage in public conversations are part of her current interests.

Dr. Porras has participated in mentoring projects around the local community (In Watsonville, with the high school newspaper El Talon and in Salinas with Radio Bilingue. She designed a "deep listening" experimental project in Salinas called "The Big Ear Project" in partnership with the Sustainable City Years Program, and she collaborated with the non-profit, Citizens for Sustainable Seaside, developing a series of community media and social media interventions called See-Seaside project.

Dr. Porras was the advisor of the CSUMB's college newspaper The Otter Realm for seven years. She participates in the on-going conversations on journalism, media and democracy and has been involved in Media Literacy projects for Spanish speaking communities, and internationally. She keeps a partnership with Colombian colleagues and Latin American NGOs that work in media and social development programs.

She had written for magazines and peer-review journals, and published with H. Leslie Steeves a book chapter entitled Feminism in a post-development age, in McPhail, T. L.. Development communication: Reframing the role of the media. Chichester, U.K. Other publications include a chapter in "La Fiesta de la Conversación" Edex (2008) about communication for health promotion, an article in New Media & Society (2004) entitled Advertising Ecotourism on the Internet: commodifying environment and culture. She is the author of several articles in Spanish language published in Cuadernos de Dia-logos de la Comunicación-FELAFACS, and for years Estella had written feature stories for Latin American newspapers and scripts for radio documentaries.