The expansion of Esports will result in the development of a large part of the population, especially children, adolescents, and young adults, that will spend a lot of their leisure time playing or watching Esports and refraining from physical activity. It is imperative to better understand this phenomenon and prevent the associated negative health hazards before it becomes a problem for European societies. Existing evidence (see Needs analysis section for more detailed information) indicates that Esports players adopt a sedentary lifestyle spending many hours during the day playing Esports. Furthermore non-active video games and increased screen time have been associated with an increase in Body Mass Index (BMI) which results in higher levels of obesity and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors. Also, there is anecdotal evidence indicating that Esports players are sedentary for 4.2 h each day while training, and due to their sedentary lifestyle, there is a high risk of injuries and chronic diseases. The project involves the understanding of physical activity and health-related behaviors of Esports players. It envisages developing awareness-raising material and policy recommendations that will facilitate sports and Esports authorities to promote physical activity and healthy lifestyles in a population of young people who are at risk for sedentary lifestyles, obesity, and drug use. 

Over the last two decades new political parties became increasingly visible in Europe, on both sides of the political spectrum. Research highlights that these parties increasingly get involved in protest movement and campaigns. However, the role of political parties in social movement studies has been scarcely discussed with literature starting to emerge only now. As such, the objective of Party in Movement is to study the configurations between movements and parties, rather than taking them as separate entities, while mapping these relations in Portugal, Spain and Italy after 2008. Building on Jaspers’ players and arenas interactionist proposal, and Goldstone’s call to explore the role of political parties in social movements, this project aims to explore the interactions between social movements and political parties. Relying on an interactionist approach. I will dispute the classic division between outsiders and insiders, and the rigid boundaries between movements and parties, dominant in social movements studies.5 Not only is this a call to bring a more complex approach to the study of social movements, as it is a call to bring political parties back to sociological analysis. This study will answer how do political parties, movements and other players interact to create new arenas and modify existing ones. More specifically, I ask (1) what roles do political parties assume in social movements arenas after 2008 in southern European countries? (2) how and why do they assume these roles? (3) what is the difference between left and right-wing parties?My analysis will explore how political parties relate with social movements in Portugal, Spain and Italy. I will focus on the following cases: (1) Portugal – Left Bloc and Chega; (2) Spain – Podemos and Vox; (3) Italy - 5 Star Movement and Lega (Italy). This diversity of cases will allow me to analyse emergent contemporary modalities of political action on both sides of the political spectrum, while exploring in-depth t...

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...

MYPLACE explores how young people’s social participation is shaped by the shadows (past, present and future) of totalitarianism and populism in Europe. Conceptually, it goes beyond the comparison of discrete national ‘political cultures’ or reified classifications of political heritage (‘postcommunist’/’liberal democratic’); it is premised rather on the pan-European  nature of a range of radical and populist political and philosophical traditions and the cyclical rather than novel nature of the popularity they currently enjoy. Empirically, MYPLACE employs a combination of survey, interview and ethnographic research instruments to provide new, pan-European data that not only measure levels of participation but capture the meanings young people attach to it. Analytically, through its specific focus on ‘youth’ and the historical and cultural contextualization of young people’s social participation, MYPLACE replaces the routine, and often abstract, iteration of the reasons for young people’s ‘disengagement’ from politics with an empirically rich mapping of young people’s understandings of the civic and political space that they inhabit. In policy terms, MYPLACE identifies the obstacles to, and facilitators of, young people’s reclamation of the European political arena as a place for them.