José Duarte Ribeiro is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara. He is also a co-coordinator in the project "Democratic Innovations in Portugal" funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (FCG) at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon.  Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, where he worked on democratic innovations and citizen participation under the Horizon Europe-funded research project "Inclusive Citizenship in a World in Transformation: Co-Designing for Democracy (INCITE-DEM)". He continues to collaborate as an associated researcher on this project.

He completed his bachelor's degree in Sociology at the University of Porto (2013) and his master’s degree in urban and Regional Planning at the University of Aveiro (2015). In January 2023, he earned a PhD in Sociology from the Department of Sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal RIVAR, which is edited by the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Santiago de Chile (USACH). He is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Society for Rural Sociology (ESRS) and collaborates closely with the Research Committee on Sociology of Agriculture and Food (RC40) of the International Sociological Association (ISA). In 2021, he was a visiting researcher at the Department of Agricultural Economics at Ghent University (Belgium). That same year, he was also an invited lecturer in the Rural Sociology course at the Department of Sociology at Middle East Technical University. Previously, he served as a lecturer and research fellow at the Centre for Latin American Studies at Ankara University from 2018 to 2023. In that context, he was, for a brief period in April-May 2022, at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) as a visiting lecturer teaching on Rural Transformation in Turkey and in April-May 2023, he was at Havana University (Cuba) as a visiting lecturer teaching on Social Change in Turkey: 1923-2023. He has published in a refereed international journal and has presented multiple papers at international conferences, in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, on rural sociology and rural/regional development. He teaches and researches topics including rural social movements and rural politics, the commons and participatory governance.