Bio notes

Vera Polido Baeta (Dinâmia' Cet, ISCTE-IUL) | Architect and urban planner. PhD, Oxford Brookes University. She has been working on land rights, means of production and urban planning in Portuguese-speaking Africa, most recently in Mozambique, and on the implementation of European housing funds at IHRU I.P. She teaches on the RIBA course at the School of Architecture, Oxford Brookes.

José António Bandeirinha (University of Coimbra, Department of Architecture) | Architect, graduate of the Porto School of Fine Arts (1983). He practises professionally and is a Full Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Coimbra, where he obtained his PhD in 2002 with a thesis entitled ‘The SAAL Process and Architecture on 25 April 1974’. He is a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies. He was Head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Coimbra (2002–2004; 2006–2007 and 2017–2021). He served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Culture at the University of Coimbra (2007–2011). He was Director of the College of Arts at the University of Coimbra (2011–2013). He was a curator of the exhibition ‘Fernando Távora: Permanent Modernity’, coordinated by Álvaro Siza, as part of Guimarães’ designation as European Capital of Culture 2012. He was a Scientific Advisor for the exhibition *The SAAL Process: Architecture and Participation 1974–1976*, curated by Delfim Sardo and organised by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, Canada (2014–2015). In the Department of Architecture at the University of Coimbra, he has been teaching regularly on the Integrated Master’s in Architecture and the CoimbraStudio PhD programme, and has been a guest lecturer at various Portuguese and European schools of architecture. He has devoted his research to the architectural and urban consequences of political practices, with a particular focus on 20th-century Portugal.

Tiago Castela (University of Coimbra, Centre for Social Studies) | Tiago Castela (Lisbon, 1974) is a historian of architecture and urbanism, and an architect. He researches the history of peripheral architecture and also contributes, through the lens of architecture, to the history of housing policies. For both areas of research, he focuses on Portugal and Southern Africa during the transition from colonialism to democratisation. He writes architectural history informed by an ethnographic sensibility. In 2011, he completed his PhD in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, in the USA. He is a research assistant at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, where he is also a visiting lecturer in the Department of Architecture. He is also a collaborating researcher at the Nuno Portas Centre for Studies at FAUP. He lives in Porto with his 9-year-old daughter.

Aharon de Grassi (College of the Desert, USA) | He is a critical, interdisciplinary and engaged geographer with 25 years’ experience focusing on the political economy of rural development in Africa, particularly in Angola. In addition to contemporary reconstruction and development in rural Angola, his research projects include the dialectical political ecology of Amílcar Cabral, the colonial roots of Weberian approaches in African Studies, and long-term rural transformations before and after the 1961 rural uprising in Angola at Baixa de Kasanje. He obtained his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a research fellow in Portugal and at the Universities of Yale and Bayreuth, as well as having worked with various research institutes and international organisations.

Rui Aristides Lebre (Birmingham City University, UK) | Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture and the Built Environment at Birmingham City University (BCU), UK, is an architect and researcher specialising in spatial practices, focusing on the experimental application of ethnographic methods to the study of the social and environmental effects of the production of space. His recent research examines the history of the military settlements used by Portugal as a colonial power during the wars of liberation in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. At BCU, Dr Lebre is currently co-coordinator of the Architecture degree programme (L4_BA Arch) and a delegate on the Ethics and Research Integrity Committee for the Arts and Humanities.

Francisco Sousa Lobo | I am a comic book author with a degree in fine art, comics and architecture, and I teach critical theory, comics and illustration in London and Lisbon. My work, which now comprises 18 publications, straddles the boundaries between documentary, autobiography and fiction. *Aldeamentos de Guerra*, the project I am presenting, falls within the essayistic and documentary strand of my work. My work has been published and promoted, to critical acclaim, in Portugal, the United Kingdom, Spain, French-speaking countries, Italy, Croatia, Latvia and Latin America. I am interested in the overlap and interplay between form and concept in comics, the relationship between image and text, and an intuitive narratology that does not adhere to rigid models but rather explores hybrid territories. My comics draw on life and reality, on reading and on the very practice of comics itself. They are simple in terms of accessibility and their relationship with earlier and contemporary forms of comics, yet complex in the very references they absorb or reveal. I often choose a theme that is powerful or close to some form of human radicalism, to a limit of human experience. Comics, as I understand them, are more than just a literary subgenre; they are a form of visual storytelling with specific properties and codes, in which uncharted territory, from an authorial perspective, is clearly present and visible. There is much to be done.

Ana Filipa Ramos (University of Porto, Faculty of Architecture) | An architecture student at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, she is currently working on her master’s thesis entitled ‘Seeing, Mapping, Recognising: Invisibilised female practices in African colonial settlements’. She is a research fellow on the “RuralDecol” project, run by the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and funded by the FCT.

Isabel Raposo (University of Lisbon, Gestual-CIAUD) | Architect (ESBAL, 1976), PhD in urban planning (University of Paris XII, 1999), with postdoctoral research at the Centre for African Studies; she is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon, where she taught between 2002 and 2022. She is an honorary member of the Order of Architects (2017). She worked for seven years in Mozambique (between 1979 and 1989) at the National Housing Directorate and the National Institute of Physical Planning, having participated in and coordinated research on the transformation of the living environment in outlying neighbourhoods and villages. In the 1990s, she acted as a consultant for the InLoco Association and the municipality of Loulé. Between 2007 and 2023, she founded and coordinated Gestual (the Group for Socio-Territorial, Urban and Local Action Studies, part of CIAUD-FA-ULisboa), having supervised several Master’s and PhD students, as well as postdoctoral projects, on urban and housing transformation in cities of Lusotopia, and co-ordinated various university outreach projects in peri-urban neighbourhoods of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (AML). Since the 1980s, he has participated in and coordinated several research projects, notably two funded by the FCT: one on informally developed neighbourhoods in the AML (2011) and ‘África Habitat’ on the urban fringes of Luanda and Maputo (2023). He has published, and has works in press, including several books, book chapters and articles.

Ramon Sarró (University of Lisbon, Institute of Social Sciences) | He studied anthropology at UCL (MSc 1989, PhD 1999) and worked at UCL and the LSE before becoming the Ioma Evans-Prichard Junior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College between 2000 and 2002. He was a Fellow of the Programme in Agrarian Studies at Yale in 2010–11, before joining Oxford in 2012. He has conducted field research in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Portugal (among African diasporas), Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Sarró has worked on the religious and political dimensions of social change in Africa and the diaspora, as well as on manifestations of prophetic imagination and material culture (including iconoclastic destruction).
Following his long-standing connection with the Baga-speaking communities on the Guinean coast, Sarró was recently the principal investigator on the international ‘Mangroves and Aluminium’ project, funded by the John Fell Fund’s major grants scheme (2018–21), in which a team of researchers from Europe and Guinea (Conakry) assessed the impact of aluminium mining on rice-farming communities along the Guinean coast (Baga and beyond), a region he has known since 1992. In the neighbouring country, Guinea-Bissau, Sarró was involved in the revitalisation of the National Ethnographic Museum of Bissau, an institution established in 1987 that disappeared during the 1998–99 civil war. Using old photographs, Sarró and a team of researchers pieced together the museum’s history and succeeded in re-establishing it in the capital of this West African country.
He is currently a visiting coordinating researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, where he holds the ERA Chair in ‘Imagination and Society’.

Nsambu Vicente (Angola International Polytechnic Institute – ISIA) | PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Évora (2025). He currently works as a lecturer and Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Postgraduate Studies at the Angola International Polytechnic Institute (ISIA). He is a member of two international research teams: the project *Kongo Prophets and UNESCO Technocrats: Ruins, Forests, and Heritage in Northern Angola* (2022–2025), coordinated by Ramon Sarró and funded by the Leverhulme Trust; and the project ‘Rural Decolonisation: The Portuguese Revolution and the Liberation of Villagisation Camps in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, 1974–75’, coordinated by Tiago Castela. Her research focuses on the contemporary history of Angola, with a particular emphasis on the national liberation struggle, analysed through the experiences, memories and life stories of women. Her research interests also encompass oral history, social memory, toponymy, historical and cultural heritage, and the processes of identity formation, exploring the relationships between memory, territory and society in the Angolan context.