Project List

This project engages with the topic of digital transition in the development of careers in science, focusing on the experiences of people employed in research centres at Portuguese universities. It has the main aim of exploring how these processes have transformed the research profession, with positive and negative consequences for researchers’ personal and professional development, including work/life balance and internationalization. Through evidence-based analysis, the objective of the project is to help inform policymakers and stakeholders in the Research and Development (R&D) sector of the economy about these issues as they pertain to Portugal, and create a better understanding of the impact of digital transitions on the lives of professionals for wider research communities. Theoretically, the project situates digital transitions within a mobilities context. Significantly, this body of work has acknowledged the importance of greater global interconnectedness and a reliance upon information technology in highly qualified professions. This extends to the research teams’ own contributions to the mobilities research field, including the idea that many societies are currently experiencing an immobility turn arising from a problematization of corporeal travel within urban environments and an expansion of digital work platforms, at national and international levels. These developments create new possibilities and a wider range of connections, but also place impositions on researchers, including an erosion of personal time and space by work imperatives. In regard to empirical approach, research questions aim to explore not only the extent of digitalization in research units, including key tasks relating to experimental work, field studies and international collaboration, as well as the normalization of remote working, but also the impact on the domestic sphere, taking a cross-sectional approach covering researchers at different career stages, enabling the research ...

The emergence of a new dimension of political conflict has recently dominated the academic debate on cleavages. Political debate is evolving, and new issues are entering the political sphere and dominating the public agenda. Researchers have attempted to outline new approaches to political competition and focus on the reconfiguration of conflict around a new dimension, one orthogonal to the conventional left-right cleavage. Cultural issues, such as European integration, immigration, gender equality, minority rights, and environmental concerns, are enhancing the emergence of a new cleavage. This political realignment has been associated with the emergence of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) in most industrialised countries. Against this backdrop, this project unveils whether and how the emergence and consolidation of PRRPs in Portugal and Spain relates to voters’ political realignment in terms of their preferences and perceptions. The two Iberian countries have been, for a long time, depicted as immune to the generalised emergence of populist radical right actors in Europe. Nonetheless, this exceptionalism came to an end when Vox and Chega entered mainstream politics in Spain and Portugal, respectively, in the late 2010s. Through an approach based on the demand side of politics, this project proposes a bottom-up investigation of the political preferences of Spanish and Portuguese citizens to assess the emergence of a cultural cleavage and its relationship with the emergence/consolidation of RPPRs. To attain this objective, this project employs a comparative research strategy based on the development of a large N online survey in the two countries. This survey includes a battery of questions on attitudes towards economic and cultural issues, as well as items on party identification and issue ownership. This questionnaire also includes a conjoint survey experiment. In this project, this methodological approach is crucial to unveil the main dimensions of political...

How did the masses of workers who built the great infrastructures and public buildings in Macau during the Portuguese rule impact their conception and construction? How were the long-distance relations between central institutions based in Portugal (e.g. the Colonial Urbanisation Office) and the colonial public works (CPW) in Macau, particularly crossing the 20th century, is still scarce and little is known about its labour management and operations. How and to what extent was it different from other former colonial territories? The discipline of architecture, when approaching the PW associated with colonialism and territorial occupation in Macau, has so far focused mainly on technicians and the constitution of design teams. Even studies about the technical and conceptual knowledge transfers between experts from Macau, Portugal, Hong Kong and China remain scarce. This focus on the design elite does not consider the input of workers who built infrastructure and public facilities. As such, critical questions about the labour involved in the spatialisation of the architectural plans are still missing: who were these workers? Did they come from mainland China? How were they recruited? How were they paid? What skills did they bring? What training did they receive? What repercussions did these work experiences have? What conflicts did they provoke? Did they resist? Did they collaborate? In response, the LabourMap-Macao will evaluate the role(s) and impact of mass labour to shed light on (still) invisible workers. It will survey master plans, architectural projects, construction sites, and labour movements to offer more complex narratives on the relationship between the history of China and Portuguese colonisation through PW construction. The project aims for a broader intersection of agents and geographies and to open a new line of research intersecting architectural, labour, and construction history studies. It will cross two colonial powers – the Portuguese and the Brit...

Bayesian structural equation modeling (BSEM) is receiving increasing interest primarily due to its ability to address some of the issues found in the mainstream frequentist approach (e.g., nonconvergence, Heywood cases, sample size limitations, and inadmissible solutions). Additionally, BSEM allows for the fitting of complex models that classical maximum likelihood methods might struggle to handle. A critical component of any Bayesian analysis is the prior distribution of the unknown model parameters. A key distinction between Bayesian structural equation modeling and frequentist structural equation modeling is the use of priors. Researchers may be skeptical about the subjectivity of prior distributions and their impact on Bayesian modeling. However, priors are a significant advantage of using Bayesian statistics, as they allow previously known information to be transparently and directly included in the model specification. Proper prior elicitation is essential for translating knowledge and judgment about a phenomenon into a probability distribution. Priors allow for the quantification of uncertainty and encapsulate available knowledge about the parameters before observing the data. There are several ways to translate prior knowledge into distribution parameters. Results show that researchers tend to rely on weakly informative priors (i.e., small-variance priors). However, prior elicitation in Bayesian structural equation modeling still has a long way to go in terms of development and widespread adoption.

This impact assessment study of the redevelopment process in Municipal Districts within the scope of the PRR aims to analyze and evaluate the results achieved by the ongoing redevelopment processes in the Municipal Districts. The study covers three areas: Condado, in the parish of Marvila, Padre Cruz, in the parish of Carnide (1989-1995), and Sargento Abílio, in the parish of Benfica (1998-2001). Each case study corresponds to different municipal housing development programs.