Senior Research Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology
Biography
Dr Patrick O’Hare is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow (FLF) in the Department of Social Anthropology. His research interests centre on recycling economies in Latin America and include the themes of labour, waste, recycling, infrastructure, and plastics. He has conducted research in Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, and the UK.
Dr O’Hare’s current UKRI-funded research project is entitled ‘Transforming Plastics into Solidarity: Ethical Vertical Integration and Binational Recycling’ and centres on intersections between social and circular economies in the Uruguayan and Argentine plastics industries.
After receiving his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2017, he held research positions at the Universities of Surrey, Manchester, and Cambridge. He forms part of both the AHRC-funded Cartonera Publishing Research Project, focused on the cardboard book-making publishing phenomenon in Latin America and the UKRI-funded Cambridge Creative Circular Plastics Centre. At the University of Manchester, he held an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) research fellowship.
Selected publications
Circular Economies in an Unequal World (Co-edited with Dagna Rams). 2024. London: Bloomsbury (Available Open Access)
“Rubbish belongs to the poor”: Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons. 2022. London: Pluto Press (download open access here.)
Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America (with Lucy Bell and Alex Flynn). 2022. Austin: Texas University Press
‘We looked after people better when we were informal’: the ‘quasi-formalisation’ of Montevideo’s waste-pickers O’Hare, P., 21 Jan 2020, In: Bulletin of Latin American Research. 39, 1, p. 53-68 16 p.Article › peer-review
Creating waste and resisting recovery: contested practices and metaphors in post-neoliberal Argentina? O’Hare, P., 30 Jul 2020, In: Ethnos. Latest Articles, 21 p.Article › peer-review
Cultural responses to the war on drugs: writing, occupying, and ‘public-ing’ in the Mexican City O’Hare, P. & Bell, L., 14 May 2020, In: City & Society. 32, 1, p. 203-227 25 p.Article › peer-review
Waste and its disguises: technologies of (un)knowingAlexander, C. & O’Hare, P., 30 Jul 2020, In: Ethnos. Latest Articles, 25 p.Article › peer-review
‘The landfill has always borne fruit’: precarity, formalisation and dispossession among Uruguay’s waste pickers O’Hare, P., 5 Mar 2019, In: Dialectical Anthropology. 43, 1, p. 31-44 14 p.
