Patricia Alves de Matos

Patrícia Alves de Matos is a tenure-track Auxiliary Researcher at the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL) and CRIA – Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, Lisbon, Portugal, where she coordinates the research group Livelihoods, Politics and Inequalities. An economic anthropologist trained in Lisbon and London, she holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London, awarded without corrections. Her research examines neoliberalism, precarity, labour, welfare, and social reproduction in Southern Europe, with particular attention to the moral economies and distributive politics shaping everyday life. She is the Principal Investigator of the project, Everyday Worlds of Welfare: Towards a Comparative Anthropology of Welfare Calculus and Livelihood Sustainability (EVA). She co-edits Anthropological Theory and is a member of the GER – Reciprocity Studies Group at the University of Barcelona. She is currently co-editing the forthcoming volume Distributed Agency: Rethinking a Radical Concept for Challenging Times (under review), which reconceptualises agency through feminist, political-economic, and ethnographic perspectives. Her monograph, Disciplined Agency: Neoliberal Precarity, Generational Dispossession and Call Centre Labour in Portugal (Manchester University Press, 2020), provides an ethnographic analysis of youth, work, and dispossession in post-crisis Portugal. With over a decade of international research and teaching experience across Portugal, the UK, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland, she has contributed to numerous collaborative projects, including ERC-funded research on grassroots economies, post-COVID labour, and food provisioning systems. Her work combines rigorous scholarship with sustained public engagement on inequality, care, and human dignity.

Expertise details:

Portugal; South Europe; economic anthropology; precarity; labour; gender; welfare and needs; social reproduction; critical feminism; distributed agency.

Selected publications:

· Alves de Matos, Patrícia. "Political struggles over the logic of human needs quantification". Focaal (2025): 1-14. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2025.0903of3.

· Alves de Matos, Patrícia. "Life-Making on the Line: Capitalist Value, Social Reproduction, and the Politics of Call Centre Labour in Portugal". Anthropology of Work Review (2025): 1-9. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/awr.70013.

· Alves de Matos, Patrícia. "Distributed agency: Care, human needs, and distributive struggles in Portugal". Critique of Anthropology (2023): http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0308275x231207732.

· Pusceddu, Antonio Maria; Alves de Matos, Patrícia. "On the common sense of social reproduction: social assistance and ideologies of care in austerity Europe". Dialectical Anthropology 46 4 (2022): 477-496. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10624-022-09668-3.

· Alves de Matos, Patrícia. "Bodies of and against austerity: gendered dispossession, agency and struggles for worth in Portugal". Social Anthropology (2021): http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13107.

· Alves de Matos, Patrícia; Pusceddu, Antonio Maria. "Austerity, the state and common sense in Europe: A comparative perspective on Italy and Portugal". Anthropological Theory (2021): 146349962199132. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1463499621991326.

· Matos, Patricia. Disciplined Agency: Neoliberal precarity, generational dispossession and call centre labour in Portugal. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2020.

· Matos, P.. "Austerity Welfare and the Moral Significance of Needs in Portugal". In Grassroots Economies Living with Austerity in Southern Europe, Susana Narotzky (ed), 113-130. London: Pluto Press, 2020.

· Matos, Patrícia. "Locating precarization: the state, livelihoods and the politics of precarity in contemporary Portugal". Dialectical Anthropology 43 1 (2019): 15-30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-09543-8.

· Matos, Patrícia Alves de. "Precarity, gender capital and structures of (dis)empowerment in the neoliberal service economy". In Gender, Work and Migration Agency in Gendered Labour Settings, edited by Megha Amrith ; Nina Sahraoui, 158-174. London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2018.