About Us Pablo Porten-Cheé
Junior Professor of “Communication Studies and Information Society in Ibero-America”
Affiliation: Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies - HCIAS
Co-operation: Faculty of Modern Languages, Institute for Translation and Interpreting
Tel.: +49 (0)6221 54-19337
Email: pablo.porten-chee(at)uni-heidelberg.de
Dr. Pablo Porten-Cheé is a communication researcher who earned his Ph.D. from the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf studying the effects of media content on everyday face-to-face and online conversations. Since April 2021, he is Junior Professor for Communication Studies at Heidelberg University with an emphasis on information societies in Latin America.
Pablo Porten-Cheé began his career in research at the Ilmenau University of Technology, contributed to communications research at the University Düsseldorf for several years, and worked at the University of Zurich’s Department of Communication and Media Research. Before he joined Heidelberg University, he was a postdoc at Berlin’s Freie Universität at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies. He also led the research group “Digital Citizenship” at the Weizenbaum Institute for the networked society (WI). He is an associate researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute (funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research).
Research
At the HCIAS, Pablo Porten-Cheé is focused primarily on online communication in Latin America and the effect it has on individuals. Dissatisfaction with democracy and the spread of misinformation online are two current challenges being faced by the somewhat fragile information societies of Latin America. His primary research interests are focused accordingly on how users react to misinformation in social media or how political narratives (such as online petitions) can motivate people to participate in politics. His research interests lean in towards the study of political communication under the conditions of a digitalized media world. His current projects deal in particular with the factors affecting political participation and opinion formation online.
Research in Progress
- Digital Citizenship: The goal of this research program is to observe the long-term change in political participation under digital media conditions and takes interest in the ever-changing factors contributing to political participation on an individual level (e.g., citizenship norms, narratives). This program grounds on a close collaboration with Prof. Martin Emmer and colleagues from the Freie Universität Berlin/Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society.
- Political participation and media use of the Latin-American community in the US: In this collaborative project, under the direction of Prof. Alcides Velásquez (University of Kansas), the political participation and media use of members of the Latin-American community in the USA are being studied. The two objectives of this study are to shine a light on the conditions for political engagement in a growing community, as well as study and expand the knowledge on contextual repertoires in the study of communication (since 2021).
- Food Narratives: Individual political action to alleviate environmental and public health issues is demanding. In this research project, we investigate whether narrative features of petitions help to promote awareness and action regarding food issues and do this with extensive experimental survey data from Germany, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, and Italy. This research project is funded by 4EU+ and grounds on a collaboration with colleagues at Heidelberg University (Prof. Jale Tosun, Charlene Marek) as well as at Charles University Prague (Prof. Vílem Novotny), University of Copenhagen (Prof. Carsten Daugbjerg), and the Università degli Studi di Milano (Prof. Paola Mattei).
- Public discourse on the pandemic in Latin America. Awareness, understanding, and social attitudes: A case study on Argentina: The goal of this cooperative project is to analyze the socio-communicative dynamics of discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic in educational contexts in Argentina. In order to understand the discursive construction of social representations, both, the discourses on education produced by the media as well as the discourses of the educational institutions themselves and their political representatives are being studied. This project is funded by the DAAD (lead PI Francisco Moreno-Fernández).
- The Public Negotiation of Justice in Transitions to Sustainability (JuTSy): The project is particularly interested in the public negotiation of justice in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), a region affected by climate change and pursuing decarbonization policies. The project builds on an interdisciplinary analytical framework, that combines knowledge from human geography, communication science, and political science to further our understanding of how societies negotiate just transitions and how politics both controls and responds to this public negotiation. While a geographical perspective pays attention to how perspectives on justice might differ according to spatial scales, communication research offers insight to understand how transition processes are communicated and framed. Political Science, in turn, helps us to understand what citizens perceive as just and what tenets (procedural, distributive, justice as recognition) are given priority to.
Recent Publications
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Recent Presentations and Media Contributions
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Teaching
Winter Semester 2024/2025
- Communication and Public Spheres in Ibero-America
- Practicing Quantitative Data Analysis with SPSS
CONTACT
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Pablo Porten-Cheé
Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies | HCIAS
Brunnengasse 1, 69117 Heidelberg
Tel.: +49 (0)6221 54-19337
Email: pablo.porten-chee(at)uni-heidelberg.de
Visiting address:
Brunnengasse 1, 69117 Heidelberg
Room 103 (3012.01.103)
Office Hours
Schedule a meeting at pablo.porten-chee(at)uni-heidelberg.de