Matías Matías Aravena Hinojosa (2025)

I am a Chilean PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. My research project seeks to understand informal, illegal, and criminal labour in the context of inflation and economic uncertainty in Argentina. I strive to comprehend how people imagine themselves in relation to the nation-state through labour and how they negotiate everyday state authority and create forms of political belonging. 

I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in anthropology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, where I won the prize for academic excellence. For my undergraduate dissertation I did fieldwork among informal waste workers in the eastern periphery of Santiago, mainly with recyclers and street vendors of recovered objects. Out of this work, I published a paper in the Journal of Urban Studies of the University of Buenos Aires (QUID 16) about the production of value in the urban garbage dumps in Peñalolén, Santiago; and a book chapter about the relation between subjectivity and informal labour among recyclers and street vendors in an edited volume about ethnographies of micro-entrepreneurship in Chile. 

Later on, from 2022 until 2024, before moving to the UK, I worked in Santiago as a research assistant for the Millenium Research Center for the Study of Violence and Democracy (VIODEMOS). There I did ethnographic fieldwork about fear of crime, gentrification and hopes of democracy in a neighbourhood in central Santiago. I also worked on reparation politics and the intergenerational transmission of harm following the human rights violations done by the dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990). 

Before arriving in Cambridge, I did the MSc. Politics, Violence and Crime, in the Department of Social Anthropology at UCL. My master’s dissertation is a comparative study of the hegemonic struggles over the meaning of informality in contemporary Argentina.