He joined the APS in 1988 (no. 411), while still a sociology student at the University of Porto, to attend the 1st Portuguese Sociology Congress. He joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Minho in 1990, and has not left since. He has also been a member of CECS (Center for Communication and Society Studies, based at the University of Minho) since 2020. He carried out his doctoral research on Portuguese local power (2005), and his reference work is the book that resulted from this thesis (Identities and Strategies in Portuguese Local Power, Edições Húmus/CICS).
The central themes of his research are local power, local and regional development and European integration, as well as other related themes, often analyzed using tools from the so-called “Essex School” of discourse analysis. Some of this experience has occasionally been put at the service of research projects and planning initiatives.
