Youth and climate justice movements in Portugal

Climate change and climate justice issues attract the majority of young activists in the national and international contexts over the last years. In Portugal, young adult activists have emerged with new repertoires of protest such as direct action and civil disobedience that seem to break with the traditional methods of action usually used by Portuguese activists in the past.
This project will map the main climate justice activists and collective action events that emerged from 2019 to 2024 in Portuguese society. The research follows these objectives: (1) Analyse the socio-biographical portraits of activists belonging to most representative climate justice groups (2) Reconstruct the main national and international events in which Portuguese activists participated (3) Analyse the impact of digital media on their international connections and links (4) Identify social and cultural action meanings to determine their positions against political and economic opponents and (5) Identify their relations with political parties and pressure groups such as trade unions.
We will apply a qualitative methodology with different tools to collect empirical data. In addition, we will use and adapt Lahire’s method of sociological portraits (Lahire, 2002) to study activist’s life stories.
There is limited research in Portuguese Sociology that has applied Lahire’s Method (Gomes et al., 2012; Lopes et al., 2018) and these studies didn´t focus on social movements and protest groups. Applyng Lahire´s method for the first time to biographical and sociological analysis of activists will be a significant contribution to Portuguese Sociology and the study of social movements and collective action.

Achieved Outputs:
Nunes, C. (2025). Da família às redes digitais: processos de socialização política em
ativistas portugueses (paper submitted).
- Nunes, C. (2025). “Media digitais e mobilização política em tempos de austeridade: Processos de socialização de ativistas portugueses”, paper presented at V Jornadas de Ciências da Comunicação, University of Coimbra, 25-26 June.
- Nunes, C. (2024). "Social Movements and Political Protests in Portugal during and after the Austerity Crisis", paper presented at the 16th Conference of the European Sociological Association, 27-30 August, Porto.
Expected Outputs (2025-2026):
Book proposal on Social Movements in Portugal in the 21st Century (to be submitted)