Patrícia Ribeiro Mendes Alves de Matos

Patrícia Alves de Matos is an economic anthropologist trained in Lisbon and London. She is a senior researcher at CRIA/ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon and an invited lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at FCSH/New University of Lisbon. Her project is titled “Everyday Worlds of Welfare: A Comparative Study of Human Needs, Livelihood Sustainability and Social Policy in Southern Europe”. This project proposes a comparative bottom-up approach to human welfare calculus and welfare sustainability, focusing on the theoretical relevance of the concept of ‘everyday worlds of welfare’ (EWW). I provisionally define EWW as the historically and locally embedded set of practices, normative livelihood ethics and folk valuation arguments informing how households and individuals define and pursue the fulfilment of tangible and intangible needs (i.e., resources and claims) necessary to secure intergenerational livelihood sustainability. In a context of rising inequalities and the need to enhance the resilience of European welfare states, the EWW concept will outline a more holistic framework of welfare analysis, potentially acting as a valuable compass on the relation between people’s embedded knowledges and social policy interventions. It will foster novel ways to devise greater equity in distributing well-being resources and their sustainability across generations. It will contribute to formulating more inclusive well-being indicators, thus responding to the recent call by leading academics and political agents to shift towards a Wellbeing Economy strategy in a post-COVID world. Her research interests include neoliberalism, precarity and labour; gender, body politics and social reproduction; austerity welfare, needs and moralities of distribution. Manchester University Press published her monograph “Disciplined Agency: Neoliberal Precarity, Generational Dispossession and Call Centre Labour in Portugal” in July 2020.