Dr. José Castro-Sotomayor
Assistant Professor of Environmental Communication at California State University Channel Islands
Dr. José Castro-Sotomayor is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Communication at California State University Channel Islands. He is a research practitioner interested in environmental and intercultural dynamics of policy development and community outreach. He facilitates community-based decision and policy making processes through the design and implementation of identity-based participatory communication models for community building and conflict resolution. He has taught in Ecuador, Colombia, and the United States. He conceives learning as an organic form of cultural and ecological awareness that grows up from students’ everyday experiences with both the human and more-than-human worlds. Originally from Ecuador, he is a native Spanish speaker and fluent in English and has published English-Spanish translations of academic books in economy and political science subjects.
His research has been recognized with the Christine L. Oravec Journal Article Award 2020. Environmental Communication Division, National Communication Association (NCA). Among his publications, he co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020), which received the Tarla Rai Peterson Book Award 2020. Environmental Communication Division (NCA). This transdisciplinary volume seeks to foster a radical epistemology focused on ways ecocultural identities are being, and can be, thought, felt, performed, and experienced within wider sociopolitical structures in ways relevant to regenerative Earth futures.
Currently, he is a Community-Based Research Faculty Fellows at CSU Channel Islands, Associate Editor of the Journal Frontiers in Communication, and member of the Editorial Board of Quarterly Journal of Speech.
