I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon and an integrated researcher at CIES-Iscte. My research focuses primarily on social movements, collective action, and political participation, with particular attention to relations between movements, parties, and institutions, the transnational circulation of mobilisation, and the political and social conditions that foster different forms of collective action.

One of the main strands of my research concerns the relationship between social movements and political parties, including the alliances, boundaries, and forms of influence between these actors. I have paid particular attention to interactions that take place outside the public sphere, proposing the concept of backstage partyisation to analyse the involvement of political parties behind the scenes of mobilisation.

I have also developed a line of research on environmental and climate movements, focusing on their transnational diffusion and on the political and socioeconomic conditions that help explain differences in mobilisation across countries. This work has examined, among other cases, Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future.

I combine qualitative and quantitative methods, drawing on comparative case studies, event analysis, survey data, and computational methods. More recently, I have been developing event analysis beyond protest, seeking to include systematically other activities undertaken by social movements, ranging from engagement with institutions and the media to internal organisation and community activities.

I received my PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge in 2019. In 2022, my dissertation received the Best PhD Dissertation Prize from the Portuguese Political Science Association and was published as Contesting Austerity: Social Movements and the Left in Portugal and Spain (Amsterdam University Press, 2022), which received the João Ferreira de Almeida Prize in 2024.

From 2019 to 2020, I was a researcher at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. I was also a FLAD Visiting Professor at Brown University in 2023 and a Visiting Professor at the University of Florence in 2024, and undertook research stays at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the University of York.

My work has appeared in journals such as Sociology, European Societies, Environmental Science & Policy, Housing Studies, and Social Movement Studies, and I have contributed to volumes including the Oxford Handbook of Climate Action and the Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Social Movements. I also write regularly for non-academic audiences in Portuguese and international publications.

Personal website: tiagomlcarvalho.github.io