Navigating neutrality and advocacy in contexts of housing precarity: comparing university-community engagement across Lusophone Cities

Universities are increasingly expected to engage with pressing social issues, amid deepening urban inequalities and housing crises. This paper examines activist and participatory action research in specific urban contexts in Angola, Portugal and Brazil, drawing on collaborations with communities facing housing precarity. The study develops a comparative-analytical reading of how different institutional configurations shape the possibilities, limits and political meaning of engaged research. Building on Freire’s pedagogical legacy, feminist theory, and decolonial approaches, we analyse how participatory practices challenge the boundaries between academic work, civic participation, and political action. The study combines literature review, documentary analysis, and systematised reflexive materials from long-term engagements. Findings are structured across five dimensions: institutionalisation, organisational actors, forms and temporalities of engagement, relationships to policy, and types of outcomes. The article shows that while some experiences of Brazil’s university extension system represent a relatively consolidated infrastructure for PAR, Portugal and Angola reveal more fragmented and externally driven configurations, often sustained by activist networks and NGOs. Across contexts, participatory practices expose the limits of academic neutrality and foreground the need for reflexive, accountable, and justice-oriented scholarship. By situating these insights within Lusophone trajectories, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on epistemic injustice and the transformative potential of participatory research in shaping fairer urban and regional policies.