Duarte Rodrigues' areas of study include communication theory, pragmatics, interaction discourse, and conversation analysis. In the 1960s and '70s, Portuguese universities had yet to follow the lead of most other Western European countries in establishing communications departments. When Duarte Rodrigues founded the FCSH communication program in 1979, it was the first in the nation to offer an undergraduate degree in the subject. Duarte Rodrigues' program emphasized theoretical approaches, in contrast to the then-dominant American model of emphasizing practical journalism. The program offered a five-year degree, with coursework equally split between the liberal arts and communication theory. As Peter Simonson and David W. Park write in their
International History of Communication Study, "Only two units were dedicated to journalistic techniques, which frustrated the expectations of the journalistic community that considered the new degree mocked the profession for not paying any significant attention to its practices." In 1984, FCSH became the first school in Portugal to offer a
Master's degree in communications. Duarte Rodrigues is a skeptic of the related discipline of
media studies, writing that: Communication studies that claim to have the media as an object, but that ignore this feature, do not have, therefore, the media as an object of study, but other issues that have nothing to do with the media, but with particular issues that have to do with the functioning of society, such as power, social inequalities, and certain stereotypes, such as racism, sexism, violence. [These studies are] based on the assumption that these issues depend on the functioning of the media, as if the functioning of the media was an external reality to the experience of the world and society that invented and uses them. The media of enunciation devices have influence on our behavior and have power, but this influence and this power escape our perception and therefore we are unable to discern, as they coincide with the experience that we ourselves represented. In 2014, Duarte Rodrigues and co-author Adriana Aranade Braga endorsed an
ethnomethodological approach to
discourse analysis. ==Books ==