About

Research at CRIA is organized into four Research Groups (RGs), providing a comprehensive framework: Circulation and Place-Making; Environment, Sustainability and Ethnography; Livelihoods, Politics and Inequalities; and Practices and Politics of Culture. These were complemented by bottom-up Thematic Lines (TLs) focusing on specific subjects from Health, Visual Anthropology and Arts, Studies in Arab and Islamic Contexts, Religion, South Asian Studies and Political Ecology.

Furthermore, CRIA's four Laboratories (Audiovisual, Environmental anthropology and behavioural Ecology, Biological Anthropology and Osteological Human Remains, and the Laboratory Jill Rosemary Dias) play a crucial role in advancing theoretical and methodological research, enhancing anthropological knowledge and research, enabling CRIA to facilitate collaboration between scientific subfields, methodological experimentation, and engagement with non-academic audiences.

CRIA also mobilizes the expertise of its researchers, in close relation with IN2PAST - Associate Laboratory for Research and Innovation in Heritage, Arts, Sustainability and Territory.

RESEARCH STRATEGY

CRIA is deeply committed to a scientific approach grounded in ethnography, combining analytical rigor with social relevance. Its scientific strategy prioritizes interdisciplinarity, multi-scale comparisons, and the articulation between the local and the global. This orientation is reflected in the geographical diversity of its projects, developed in Portugal and in international contexts such as Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
CRIA’s activities have reinforced the value of anthropology in Portugal and internationally, gaining recognition in areas such as civil rights (gender equality, racism, religion, and Islamophobia), public policies (migration, justice, surveillance, health, and environment), material and immaterial culture, and audiovisual production. The center is a multidimensional and innovative space within the European landscape, with an institutional identity that is internationally recognized and valued.
CRIA fosters international collaborations in research and dissemination, aligning itself with relevant academic debates and public interventions. Valuing deep and prolonged ethnographic research, the center maintains an independent approach, committed to theoretical innovation and the production of knowledge that responds to social expectations. In addition, CRIA promotes public events that stimulate dialogue on urgent social issues, advocating fair policies for inclusive and sustainable societies.
Committed both to fundamental science and to the production of social and cultural knowledge, its strategic research areas include:
a) Collaborative and inclusive approach to heritage;
b) Migrations and inclusive societies;
c) Social policies and governance;
d) Family, gender and sexuality; 
e) Humans and Environment, Anthropology of ecological disasters;
f) Consequences of austerity: precariousness and grassroots economics;
g) Racism, xenophobia and islamophobia;
h) Health and multiculturalism;
i) Inclusive policies on health and education;
j) Religious practices.

Projects 2025-2029

In CRIA’s scientific strategy for 2025–2029, five structuring initiatives stand out:
The Digital Ethnographic Archive will safeguard materials collected by CRIA's anthropologists during their fieldwork, playing a significant role in preserving ethnographic archives in Portugal. Digitalizing field notes, photographs, videos, and audio recordings, this archive will ensure the long-term preservation and accessibility of ethnographic materials both to scholars and the communities from which these materials were collected, along with future generations of researchers, students, and the wider public, ensuring a second life for ethnographic archives.
The scientific project for a Migrations Museum will be based on contemporary museological paradigms on migratory dynamics. Following worldwide institutions that opened or restructured museums dedicated to this theme, CRIA will address the colonial and post-colonial dimension of migrations to and from Portugal, as well as its intra-imperial mobilities and the European, Asian, North, and South American flows. The different legal and administrative frameworks that produced categories of Otherness (immigrant, emigrant, refugee, foreigner, exiled) are paramount in this project.
The Atlas of Socio-Environmental Interfaces will be a collective project aiming to critically explore interaction between humans and the environment, whether in a context of multispecies or human/non-human relationships, or in the context of human intervention. Using a geographical approach, CRIA will foster a continuous space for reflection on the spatiality of the environment. The Atlas will be translated into an online navigable map that will inform ethnographic-based decision-making, sustainable solutions to environmental challenges, and empower communities.
The Forum for Cumulative and Well-Being Crises will be a platform to engage in critical observation, analysis, and public dissemination of policies' ideological, political, and social content. Its focus is primarily on policies to mitigate crisis effects and promote livelihood well-being, including their grassroots effects and counter-effects. In addition to producing classical academic outputs, the Forum will issue media releases and policy briefs. Its broader objective is to gather information that strengthens Portugal's social policy systems with a holistic framework for well-being analysis.
The Toolkit for Restitution will equip researchers, policymakers, and practitioners with the tools and methodologies necessary to engage in meaningful processes of restitution and reconciliation. Drawing on anthropology's practice, theory, and history, this toolkit will be a guide for both public and private entities, as well as stakeholders in the public sphere, on the relationships between archives, collections, and museums with communities (national, post-colonial, indigenous, and diasporic), namely those affected by colonialism and displacement.
With these initiatives, CRIA reinforces its commitment to both fundamental and applied science, contributing to more inclusive, sustainable, and just societies. Its mission is to continue affirming Anthropology as a central discipline for understanding and addressing contemporary challenges, combining theoretical innovation, in-depth ethnography, and social responsibility.