About
Cristina Maria Pinto Roldão is a sociologist and Integrated Researcher at CIES-Iscte (Center for Research and Studies in Sociology) within the School of Sociology and Public Policy at ISCTE - Lisbon University Institute. She concurrently serves as a visiting adjunct professor at the Setúbal School of Education (ESE-IPS), where she co-coordinates the Roadmap for Anti-Racist Education since 2019. Her work bridges academic research and public advocacy on racism, Blackness, and educational equity in Portuguese society.
Dr. Roldão's research centers on institutional racism in education, with focus on school exclusion mechanisms affecting African descendants and the reconstruction of Black history in Portugal. She develops critical pedagogical frameworks to dismantle Eurocentrism in curricula and intercultural education policies. Her scholarship connects migration studies, critical race theory, and post-colonial analysis, particularly examining ethno-racial data collection challenges and anti-racist praxis in institutional contexts.
Her publication trends (2007-2019) reveal consistent engagement with educational inequality, evolving toward sharper focus on Black epistemologies and institutional racism. Early work analyzed policy interventions in disadvantaged districts, while her 2019 publications pioneered empirical studies on vocational tracking of African descendants and police violence in Lisbon's peripheries. All publications demonstrate methodological innovation in addressing Portugal's historical resistance to ethno-racial categorization.
As a public intellectual, Dr. Roldão served as columnist for Público (2022-2024) and contributed to national policy initiatives including the National Plan to Combat Racism (2021/22) and 2021 Census ethnic-racial data collection. She co-edits the forthcoming Afroeuropeans: Identities, Racism, and Resistances (Routledge, 2025) and co-authored Tribuna Negra: Origens do Movimento Negro em Portugal (2023).
She actively shapes institutional frameworks through leadership in the Center for Black European Studies and the Atlantic (Carnegie Mellon, 2023), the Black Europe Summer School (2025), and the 7th Afroeuropeans Conference (Lisbon, 2019). Her research group 'Migrations, Mobility and Ethnicity' at CIES-Iscte serves as hub for decolonial scholarship, while the Anti-Racist Education Roadmap she co-develops operationalizes critical race theory in teacher training.
