Sara Araújo is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maia, since September 2025. She holds a PhD in Justice and Citizenship in the 21st Century from the University of Coimbra (2014). From 2005 to 2025, she was a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES/University of Coimbra) and a Visiting Assistant Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics of the same university between 2019 and 2023, where she taught across all three academic cycles, in both Portuguese and English, in 19 curricular units. She was also co-founder and co-coordinator of the International Doctoral Programme in the Sociology of the State, Law and Justice (CES/FEUC).
She began her career in 2000 as a research assistant at the Observatório Permanente da Justiça Portuguesa (Permanent Observatory for Portuguese Justice). Shortly thereafter, she joined a project on access to justice and legal pluralism in Mozambique, where she lived and worked for seven years. In 2008, she received the Agostinho da Silva Award from the Lisbon Academy of Sciences for her Master’s dissertation. Her doctoral research focused on a comparative study between Lisbon and Maputo, linking the sociology of law with the challenges of decolonising the social sciences and socio-legal thought.
She was a researcher at Centro de Formação Jurídica e Judiciária (Centre for Legal and Judicial Training ) in Mozambique (2005–2006), an associate researcher at the Centre for African Studies of Eduardo Mondlane University (2008–2010), and a visiting researcher at the Global Legal Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA (2015). She participated in eleven national and international research projects, conducting empirical work in Portugal, Mozambique and East Timor. She has extensive experience in qualitative and collaborative methodologies, focusing on the relationship between academia and society and on combining diverse forms of knowledge and expression.
Between 2011 and 2016, she was part of the executive coordination of the project ALICE – Espelhos Estranhos, Lições Imprevistas (ALICE – Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons ERC Advanced Grant), where she organised publications, four editions of the Summer School, and multiple workshops of the Popular University of Social Movements(UPMS)in various parts of the world. In addition to her academic output, she has been deeply engaged in disseminating knowledge through audiovisual media and initiatives that bridge science, art, and popular knowledge. Within this project, she organised numerous scientific and cultural events — such as concerts, conference-performances, ecology of knowledges stages, performances, exhibitions, UPMS workshops, forums, and Paulo Freire tents — and was one of the driving forces behind the Popular University Commitment and Art (UPEA)(2016–2017), from which she later stepped down.
She has served as a senior researcher in the Estudo Diagnóstico da Justiça em Timor-Leste(Diagnostic Study of Justice in East Timor) and as a postdoctoral fellow in the European project ETHOS – Towards a European Theory of Justice and Fairness (H2020). She was also an associate researcher in DeCode/M – (De)Coding Masculinities (FCT, 2018–2022) and UNPOP UNpacking POPulism (FCT, 2021–2024).
She is co-editor of the books Decolonising Constitutionalism: Beyond False or Impossible Lessons (Routledge, 2023) and Dynamics of Legal Pluralism in Mozambique (Kapicua, 2012), and the author of several academic articles and book chapters on legal pluralism, access to justice, decolonisation of knowledge, structural inequalities, neoliberalism, feminisms, and the media.
Since 2023, she has been part of the collective Academia sem Assédio (Academia Without Harassment), which brings together victims of sexual and moral harassment in academic contexts, rejecting the normalisation of violence in academia.