Matías Aravena

Anthropologist from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, with a Master’s degree in Politics, Violence, and Crime from University College London. Currently PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Fellow of the National Research and Development Agency (ANID) of Chile.

Argentina is currently undergoing an economic and political reconfiguration driven by the government of anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei. This project follows the daily lives of young workers in Morón, on the western periphery of Buenos Aires, who combine multiple income-generating strategies through street markets, delivery apps, and freelance work. In lives marked by economic vulnerability, it examines the moral legitimacy of work as a site where political belonging is produced and contested. In dialogue with the anthropology of labour, citizenship, and morality, the research explores what it means to be productive, what kinds of ordinary ethical relations this notion entails, how the national economy is felt and imagined, and what forms of political relations this makes possible. By examining the legitimacy of work through experiences of freedom and autonomy, the project asks how neoliberal projects of structural adjustment become legible and desirable. In doing so, it contributes to economic and political anthropology by exploring the relationship between economic life and citizenship in the context of ongoing economic restructuring in Argentina.