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 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 also a Visiting Senior Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2025–2028). 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 a pioneering 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.

PROJECTS:

2025-2029: The global hospital: Reproducing healthcare through entanglements of labour, mobility and knowledge in Switzerland and Austria, Grant number 10003770 , Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern, National Swiss Foundation. Role: Member of the Scientific Advisory Board. Public Funding: 1'057'899 CHF.

 

2024-2025: L’écologisation du monde par le bas: penser les écologies populaires du sud au nord de l’Europe [EPOPE]. CERAPS — Université de Lille (France), Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia – CRIA, ISCTE-IUL (Portugal). Role: Team Member. Public Funding: CNRS, International Emerging Actions.

 

2023-2025: Everyday Worlds of Welfare: a comparative study of human needs, livelihood sustainability and social policy in Southern Europe, Individual Research Assistant Grant, Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsciproj.ptcris.pt%2F8368EEC&data=05%7C02%7CPatricia.Matos%40iscte-iul.pt%7C316f484c66ab42d25adb08de65aebca9%7C6230e860bfc54095a6bc104721add6e6%7C0%7C0%7C639059998322566293%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=HPAAT6bDcBaFXiL9IeQWRaLYtnBBfpJFzd0o6QY7LAI%3D&reserved=0). Role: Principal Investigator. Public funding: 364.526,67 EUR.

 

2021 – 2025: Tacking informal employment in Asia: building post-COV19 solutions to precariousness through case-study based evidence on Bhutan, Laos, Maldives, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. European Research Council. Role: Coordinator Partner Team CRIA, Centre for Research in Anthropology, https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcordis.europa.eu%2Fproject%2Fid%2F101007766&data=05%7C02%7CPatricia.Matos%40iscte-iul.pt%7C316f484c66ab42d25adb08de65aebca9%7C6230e860bfc54095a6bc104721add6e6%7C0%7C0%7C639059998322601811%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=rMoncZ%2BSJild%2FQtwHp6cLxy0KLGUdFdoGoQbwvPU3es%3D&reserved=0. Public funding: 1 545 600,00 EUR.

 

2021-2023: Valuable food, essential workers, vulnerable people, and social responses to crisis: Food provisioning systems during the COVID-19 pandemic (FOOD-Pan). University of Barcelona, Spain. Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, España (Proyectos de I+D+i Convocatoria 2020). Role: Team Member. Public funding: 79,497 EUR.

 

2023: Everyday Worlds of Welfare in Southern Europe: A study on welfare calculus, human needs, and livelihood sustainability [EVA]. European Research Council Consolidator Grant. Role: Principal Investigator. Successfully passed to the second interview stage, not funded.

 

2019-2021: Governação, transformações políticas e negociação de quotidianos: Portugal 2008-2018 [Governance, Political Transformations, and Livelihood Negotiation: Portugal 2008–2018 ](LiVEPOLITICS), CRIA (Centre for Research in Anthropology– ISCTE-IUL, University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal, Foundation for Science and Technology. https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsciproj.ptcris.pt%2F153912PRJ%2F&data=05%7C02%7CPatricia.Matos%40iscte-iul.pt%7C316f484c66ab42d25adb08de65aebca9%7C6230e860bfc54095a6bc104721add6e6%7C0%7C0%7C639059998322622110%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=%2FzdW29F%2BJRcitxw0DtST%2BWe8wfelsDSWjxOvcHKBisw%3D&reserved=0  Role: Post-Doctoral Researcher. Public Funding: 238.830,08 EUR.

 

2014-2018: Grassroots economics: Meaning, project and practice in the pursuit of livelihood [GRECO] IDEAS ERC FP7, ERC Advanced Grant, Project Number: 323743. Universitat de Barcelona. European Research Council. https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcordis.europa.eu%2Fproject%2Fid%2F323743&data=05%7C02%7CPatricia.Matos%40iscte-iul.pt%7C316f484c66ab42d25adb08de65aebca9%7C6230e860bfc54095a6bc104721add6e6%7C0%7C0%7C639059998322640712%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=IWSwrIvnVm%2BRoqrWfwasTZQp1dlpIRmQmx%2FjPVJtprc%3D&reserved=0 . Role: Post-Doctoral Researcher. Public funding: 2, 408, 302 EUR.