Adriano Duarte Rodrigues was born in Lisbon, Portugal on 7 April 1942, to Silvina Duarte de Candida Rodrigues and Josè Rodrigues. As a young man, Duarte Rodrigues attended the University of Strasbourg, where he received degrees in theology and sociology. He supported himself during his education by working in a bank and then in a bottling plant. From 1971 to 1977, he was an assistant professor at the Université catholique de Louvain, obtaining his PhD in his final year there. Immediately after graduating, Duarte Rodrigues was hired as assistant professor at the FCSH of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where he founded the Communication Department. In 1979, the college named him an Extraordinary Professor, and in 1980, he became a Full Professor. Duarte Rodrigues served as the Director of the FSCH from 1988-1993 and associate dean of the university from 2001-2002. From 2002-05, he chaired the college's Scientific Council. He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Contemporânea, Em Questão, Fronteiras, Communicare, Conexão, and Rastros, and has been a visiting researcher at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, the University of Brasília and the Federal University of Pará. Duarte Rodrigues retired in April 2012. On 15 November 2012, he gave his last lecture at UNL, titled "Acerca das regras da sociabilidade". In May 2014, he was the keynote speaker for the Cumulus Conference of the University of Aveiro. Speaking to journalists later the same year, he criticized the Portuguese national exam for a linguistically confused question, calling it "huge nonsense". A Festschrift in Duarte Rodrigues' honor, titled Comunicação e linguagens: Novas Convergências, was released in December 2015. Duarte Rodrigues and Christiane H.M.N. Arnold have two children, Pierre and Cécile Rodrigues.
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. 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.
