Presenting Raquel Lima as a PhD Candidate would be accurate but putting you on the wrong foot in appreciating the spread and depth of her talents, engagements and achievements. She embodies an exceptional combination of feminist imagination, creative courage, and unwavering commitment to intersectional justice.
As a poet, art educator, performer, essayist, transdisciplinary artist and PhD researcher in Post-colonialisms and Global Citizenship at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Raquel bridges academia, activism, and artistic practice in ways that challenge and expand conventional knowledge production.
As a poet, Raquel published two books Ingenuidade Inocência Ignorância and ÚLULU, alongside spoken word performances and workshops such as Poetry, Race and Gender: For an Intersectional Poetic Writing.
As a researcher, she focuses on orature, slavery and Afrodiasporic movements, centring embodied, ancestral, and community-based epistemologies that are routinely marginalized within Eurocentric academic traditions. In that scope, she co-coordinated the 7th Afroeuropeans Conference: Black In/Visibilities Contested in 2019.
Research is not just working on her PhD, as she has already 6 published articles, and she is also co-editor of the volume Afroeuropeans: Identities, Racism and Resistances, published by Routledge in 2025 and Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid During the Covid-19 Crisis, by Pluto Press in 2020, contributing to critical debates on epistemic justice and global inequalities.
She presented her work at the Venice Biennale, and São Paulo Biennial, and she was keynote speaker of the World Congress of Women in the University Mondlane – Mozambique, and Race in Iberia Symposium at The Ohio State University. She is a founding member of several antiracist collectives, namely INMUNE – Instituto da Mulher Negra and UNA – União Negra das Artes in Portugal. She served on the advisory board of the (DE)OTHERING project, underscoring her strong commitment to collective, anti-racist, and feminist praxis. She is recognised widely, and was elected one of the 100 most influential Black personalities in Lusophony by Bantumen magazine’s annual Power List.
