PIONEER is an Alliance of European Universities dedicated to SDG 11 'Sustainable Cities and Communities', addressing the need for cities to become inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. The alliance brings together 10 impact-driven universities, including an associated Swiss partner, and covers 32 cities and 16 regions across Europe. By bringing together academics, public institutions, private organisations and citizens in our orchestration framework, we will develop joint challenge-based education, impact-driven research and innovation co-creation initiatives that contribute to many European, regional and urban agendas, such as the EU Green Deal and the 'Fit for 55' package. To this end, PIONEER will also be a facilitator of inter-institutional learning and a tool for institutional change. We will achieve this ambition through strategic integration at the institutional level: gradually aligning our individual strategies and institutional trajectories, building a common development strategy to become truly international institutions integrated in a federal framework.This framework will be inspired by the European Union, with a strong strategic centre that draws on and supports the diversity and autonomy of our partners to build a flexible and complementary academic ecosystem, while working together on a common strategy and development path. Committed to spreading European values and promoting inclusion and diversity, the PIONEER Open Campus will offer seamless mobility for students and unique leadership development opportunities for staff. Our Knowledge Hub will enable member universities and over 40 associated partners from regional ecosystems to work together on matters concerning SDG11.

  Comparative Candidate Survey Portugal, national elections 2024, with Fieldwork and database preparation for FORS - Swiss Social Science Data Bank, 2024-2026.    This project is a member of the Comparative Candidate Survey https://www.comparativecandidates.org/    https://www.comparativecandidates.org/members?page=1   &   Member of the National Research Infrastructure APIS (with ESS, PNES, etc.), and of the European Research Infrastructure (in preparation): MDem – Monitoring Electoral Democracy:https://medem.eu/      

Comparative Candidate Survey Portugal, national elections 2022, with Fieldwork and database preparation for FORS - Swiss Social Science Data Bank, 2022-2024.  This project is a member of the Comparative Candidate Survey https://www.comparativecandidates.org/  https://www.comparativecandidates.org/members?page=1 & Member of the National Research Infrastructure APIS (with ESS, PNES, etc.), and of the European Research Infrastructure (in preparation): MDem – Monitoring Electoral Democracy: https://medem.eu/   

In the early 21st century, housing has returned to the centre of struggles and political debate in the Western world. In Southern Europe, housing crises, and intensifying dynamics of gentrification and touristification, have contributed to the emergence of new housing social movements around issues such as displacement, and social and economic exclusion. Strongly affected by these trends, Lisbon is in the midst of a perfect storm for housing, generated by the intersection of the long wave of economic crisis and austerity with recent touristification, gentrification and massive real estate investment. At the same time, demographic changes (e.g. ageing, migrations and mobility) are reshaping local urban identities, which are reflected in new forms of housing activism. Social movement, urban policy and demographic studies seem to have dealt with housing in a compartmentalised way. By focusing on the city of Lisbon, a casen paradigmatic of contradictory trends but still under-theorised, HOPES aims to intertwine these analytical fields. Moving from the micro and meso dimensions of housing activism, HOPES will enlarge its scope to macro aspects such as national housing policies and global trends. HOPES' main questions are: how, and to what extent, do new housing movements mirror wider housing policies and dynamics? Which are the reciprocal influences between movements, political actors and globalising trends? What are the possible scenarios and futures in terms of housing and urban trends? HOPES adopts an interdisciplinary perspective and a mixed methodology. First, HOPES will analyse and cross information on new housing activism (ethnography, protest events and frames analysis), policy (critical policy analysis) and dynamics (mapping and demographic analysis) in housing in Lisbon. This study will be enriched by an action research partnership with the housing association Habita, and by cooperation with the FCT funded project exPERts on rehousing policies in Lisbon metro. ...

Roughly until the 2008 international financial and economic crisis and the sovereign debt crisis and austerity policies that followed, scholars studying the Southern European democracies (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) either focused on democratic consolidation or on the quality of democracy (see, for example, Morlino 1998; Gunter, Diamandouros and Phule 1995). However, the Southern European democracies have been experiencing profound changes since the emergence of the global economic and financial crises. As Matthijs (2014) noted, ‘there is already ample evidence that the strength of liberal democracy in Southern Europe has diminished since 2010, as seen in a weakening of civil and political rights, the rule of law and the functioning of government’. Clearly, there are significant changes in the functioning of contemporary democracies, especially those that haveendured painful austerity policies.The aim of this project is to examine these changes by analysing the case of Portugal, one of the countries affected most severely by the crisis, from both a longitudinal and a comparative perspective. Although it is still too early to definitely assess the impact of the economic crisis on the evolution of contemporary democracies, it is clear there are different responses to these external challenges and distinct trajectories of adaptation. Portugal can be considered a good example of one of the most important difficulties many contemporary democracies must face: the people’s loss of faith in the ability of democratic institutions — particularly legislatures, parties and the political elite — to solve problems and realise collective goals. We believe that by revisiting the concept of ‘democratic consolidation’ and by exploring aspects of a possible process of ‘democratic deconsolidation’ we can shed light on some of the changes recently experienced in European countries since the2008 crisis. The use of this concept here is not related to the consensus on the ‘rules of...

This project addresses the long-term effects of political engagement in Portugal and Spain. It mainly addresses people who mobilized against the dictatorship in Portugal at the end of the Sixties, and follows their life and activism trajectories until nowadays, using the Spanish case – characterized by a different form of transition – as a term of comparison.  The question underlying the project is: can activism transform individual patterns of political thinking and behaviour? And if so, how and in what way? Literature on the effects of social movements addresses three types of consequences: political, biographical, and cultural (Giugni, 2004). To date, political consequences (policy outcomes) have received the lion’s share and the individual level of analysis has remained underdeveloped. Exceptions are empirical studies on the long-terms effects of American activists in the 1960’s which conclude that activism had a strong effect not only on political attitudes and behaviours, but also on personal lives (Marwell and al. 1987; McAdam 1988; Fendrich 1993). Among these works, a major source of inspiration comes from McAdam’s Freedom Summer (1988), a path-breaking case study which highlights the lasting impact of activism on the personal, political and professional trajectories of ex-activists, showing how such experiences predispose them to remain politically committed. In Europe, literature dedicated to the biographical consequences of activism is even less common; it is mainly concentrated in France where some young scholars started to explore activist trajectories (Leclercq 2008; Bargel 2009;) in the wake of Fillieule’s book on political disengagement (2005). However, there is no literature specifically on the impact of activism on life trajectories in Portugal, except for Accornero’s article on the effects of repression on the Portuguese activists between the end of the dictatorship and the start of the democratic transition (Accornero, 2012b). The purpose of this...

Os seguintes pontos pretendem sintetizar os elementos e as dinâmicas da criminalização política no Estado Novo: 1. Continuidades e descontinuidades da criminalização política na reformulação autoritária do sistema político: instituições e legislação repressivas herdadas pelo Estado Novo do anterior sistema político, novas instituições e novas leis e reinterpretação de leis e instituições existentes; 2. Do processo de consolidação ao pós-guerra (1933-1949): desmobilização da anterior elite republicana e das oposições comunistas e anarquistas através das prisões políticas e da “depuração” da função pública; 3. Operacionalização da criminalização política em relação ao processo político e aos níveis de mobilização bottom down: os “anos de chumbo” e a “oposição desmobilizada” (1949-1958); eleições Delgado, guerra colonial e ciclo de protesto (1958-1969); o Marcelismo entre abertura das oportunidades, radicalização do conflito e recrudescimento da repressão (1968-1974); 4. “Repertoires of demobilization”: o que o Estado Novo partilha com as coevas democracias ocidentais e seus elementos específicos.