WaterLines: RiverBank fused art, science, and cultural history to illuminate relationships between the Chesapeake Bay watershed, its tributary the Chester River, and historic Chestertown. Waterlines transformed a vacant bank into a ‘world of rippling light and sublimely meditative sound’ evoking the connections, interdependency, and exchange between river and town. Via a collaborative, multi-disciplinary, intergenerational spatial process, WaterLines brought members of parallel communities into conversation with one another and the natural world, elevating the area’s richness and value while acknowledging the ecological, economic, and social challenges the community faces.

This chapter examines the role emotions play in contemporary capitalism, and the complex interconnections between emotions, dating apps, and capitalist markets. Drawing on work on the commodification of emotions and the constitution of capitalist subjects, and on the online economy of emotions, this chapter offers a critical analysis of Tinder and the techno-commodification of emotional life. The authors show that such dating apps are deeply disruptive of previous modes of sociality and identify five key issues that characterize this disruption: (1) the visualized self, (2) velocity and abundance, (3) networked interactivity, (4) evaluative reasoning, and (5) dividuated eroticism. Lastly, it is argued that in order to understand the ties between contemporary capitalism and the internet, we need to understand the role emotions play in this process, as well as the ways in which value gets algorithmically extracted from our innermost beings.

Until recently, Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews in Israel were mainly examined through the lens of the “isolated enclave model.” Yet the Haredi sector has undergone radical changes in a wide array of social and cultural spheres. Many of the traits that exemplified Israeli yeshiva fundamentalism at its inception, such as uncompromising dedication to Torah study, the exclusion of women from public life, sizeable families, male asceticism, and community-wide segregation, have all been called into question by community members and modified by grassroots forces. In this chapter, we offer an overview of contemporary Haredi Judaism while using three trends of religious revival – fundamentalism, charismatic manifestations and ritualization. Analytically, these trends can be identified globally, among many other religious groups. Like in other countries, Jewish men and women have reacted to monotheistic ideals of religiosity and produced a variety of new religious experiences that fuse paganism, shamanism, aspects of Buddhist spirituality with new-age spiritualties and Judaism. Demonstrating these trends in the Israeli case, we also build on feminist and critical studies to offer a more nuanced look at fundamentalism, charisma and group worship taking gender, race and inner-communal power struggles into account.

How did Israel become a “Start-Up Nation” – the Silicon Valley of the Middle East? In this chapter we argue that, in contrast to existing narratives, the rise of Israel’s high-tech sector was the result of a state-led project that dates to the 1970s and originated within the context of Israel’s corporatist economy. Building on emerging scholarship on the topic as well as our own work, we highlight how a myriad of policies and reforms – an innovation policy – introduced in this period proved crucial to the development and eventual success of the Israel’s technological sector. Far from simply a top-down project imposed by the state, this was the outcome of a corporatist-like arrangement in which Israeli state elites coordinated policies with representatives of both the private and labor-owned (Histadrut) industrial sectors. Finally, we show how the sector’s development and evolving embeddedness within global “technocapitalism” has transformed the very political-economic regime that previously supported its early success. Specifically, we consider technocapitalism’s role in changing labor relations, undermining unionized employment and advancing the professionalism of HR management. We also highlight how this process increased income inequality, while at the same time contributing to the growing labor market integration of individuals from marginalized social groups.

This article examines Israel’s control of international presence in Palestine as an ‘international mobilities regime’ that has damaging effects for the provision of services in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Focusing specifically on educators and medics, the discussion draws on long-term fieldwork to set international visa restrictions in the context of the ‘internal’ control of Palestinians’ mobilities before documenting the effects for education and healthcare provision. Discussion then turns to the scale and function of bureaucracy that produces a further significant effect: to make nothing happen whereby projects are stalled, cancelled or rendered inconceivable. To this methodologically elusive function, the approach proposed here is to attend to an order of ‘what would have been’ to better understand the power of bureaucracy to prevent movement and make people stay in place. Two main arguments are made: that Israel has developed an international mobilities regime that extends its control over Palestinian spaces; and that the scale of control is perceptible only by careful attention to the lost possibilities effected by bureaucratic restriction – and key contributions are explicated for further enquiry into bureaucracy-as-deterrent, the international dimensions of Israel’s mobility restrictions and a turn to ‘unspectacular’ sites of colonial control.

This article articulates a sociological conception of settler colonial remembering as a tool of legitimation. Theories of memory in the context of settler colonialism generally center counter-memories by the subaltern or colonized, or official hegemonizing representations at the level of state institutions. Underexamined is the dialectical nature of memory and discursive representations that help reproduce settler colonial processes of accumulation and displacement at the micro-level. The article draws on archival data from avowedly socialist-leftist Zionist colonies to explicate patterned representations of Palestinian villages that Zionist forces gradually displaced prior to and during the 1948 War/Nakba. I demonstrate how the colonial settlers attributed political meaning through five representational modes: contrasting the indigenous as backward and primitive and settlers as progressive and developed; denying an indigenous connection to the land; emphasizing amiable relations through the promotion of cultural progress and settler superiority; asymmetrically assessing settler and indigenous belongings to national collectives; and legitimizing land purchases that dispossessed indigenous cultivators, despite the settlers’ socialist ideology, while reducing conflict to the issue of economic compensation. I theorize a form of settler colonial memory based not merely on erasure, but on recognition and disavowal. Finally, I argue that local memory is a significant site of production in which the conceptual tools to both trace the historical processes of supremacy and subvert asymmetrical sociality lie.

Building on research that considers women’s roles an essential part of peacebuilding, this paper argues that a gender-national intersectionality perspective is needed to better understand the field of peace organizing. Exploring this in the context of intractable conflict in Israel-Palestine allows us to see how the intersection of gender and nationality uniquely affects women in peacebuilding. Relying on observations of group dynamics in a single organization and interviews with actors involved, we found that Palestinian women are the most marginalized in their participation, culture is used as a source of power in the way differences are conceptualized, and these aspects are embedded in gendered and gendering organizational practices that reproduce asymmetric gender-national power relations. These findings contribute to the theorization of the matrix of domination and how it is translated into peace organizing in both interactional and organizational practices, affecting possibilities of participation in dialogue groups and peacebuilding.

The paper examines the inequality regime of ultra-orthodox colleges in Israel and the ways female students interpret and experience the gender segregation within the colleges and develop their identities around it. We demonstrate how the gender segregation constitutes three types of liminality – spatial, social and epistemic – that allow ultra-orthodox women to move continuously between a familiar, religious environment to a secular foreign one. In this protected environment, they feel protected and are able to develop new identities relevant to the secular labor market while maintaining or even enhancing the traditional, religious one. The liminal space of the college reinforces their sense of entitlement for a professional place of their own and serves as a bridge that helps them to cope with the secular world.

Higher education organizations in countries where English is not the native tongue must function in a multilingual mode, using English as their primary language for scientific exchange and academic publication and relying on the native language for instruction and administration. When operating in a multilingual mode of communication and identity expression, a higher education organization runs the risk of becoming a “tower of Babel”; however, by operating solely in single-language mode, it may become an “ivory tower.” Investigating Israeli higher education organizations and focusing specifically on their mission statements, we analyzed the built-in tension of this multilingual self-identification through how they introduce themselves in the lingua franca of global academe, namely English, and in the local language, Hebrew. In our analysis, we found: (a) differences between the English- and Hebrew-language mission statements in length, style, and context; (b) differences in thematic emphases and thus in the narration of organizational identity; and (c) that such thematic differences patterned according to the three categories of state-mandated higher education organizations and, to some degree, time. We conclude that multilingualism serves both as an arena for the negotiation of organizational identity and as a state of being for higher education organizations in non-English-speaking countries.

Based on participant observations in life drawing classes at an art academy in Jerusalem, this article examines the diverse ways artists-in-the-making work out the boundaries between “art” and “non-art.” First, the classes serve as a rite of passage in which actors deploy discursive, spatial, and sensorial practices to relate to and represent the live model as a unique object of art. Second, using the model evokes moral deliberations through which students attempt to articulate how an “artistic” way of seeing the body differs from other uses of an exposed (mainly female) body prevalent in society. Third, students positioned as religious others negotiate their participation in this Western artistic tradition, using their alterity to destabilize the art/non-art boundary. These various negotiations demonstrate how the “art” category and art students’ sense of an artistic self, body, and belonging are formed through a pragmatic, relational, and multifaceted boundary work.