This paper examines the creation of women-only organizational spaces as a diversity practice and assesses their potential to facilitate the workforce inclusion of religious women from gender-conservative groups. Based on longitudinal fieldwork in two ultra-Orthodox-Jewish women-only colleges in Israel and interviews with students and staff, we demonstrate how this practice constitutes three types of liminality—spatial, social, and epistemic—that enable ultra-Orthodox women to move unimpeded between a familiar, religious environment and a secular one. In this protected and carefully curated environment, they feel safe and are able to develop new identities relevant to the secular labor market while maintaining or even enhancing their traditional, religious sense of self. The liminal space of the college reinforces their sense of belonging to a space of their own and serves as a bridge that helps them cope with the secular world.

Scholars have theorized the use of chance processes in modern art in general, and in computer-based art in particular, as the expression of an aesthetics of nonintention and authorial abnegation. Although writers of computer-generated poetry in the United States make extensive use of computer-based randomization, their creative adventures with computational indeterminacy do not lead them to endorse an aesthetics of nonintention or authorial abnegation. Rather, they cultivate different forms of authorial intentionality and pursue different and often-conflicting goals. These tensions result from computational indeterminacy's affordances in relation to the different and often-conflicting cultural currents that inform contemporary US liberal subjectivity. These currents include calls to advance social justice and inclusivity; an emphasis on self-determination; a willingness to approach technology as an inscrutable, autonomous, and self-determining form of creative agency; and the celebration of rarefied aesthetic abstraction and experimentation as a form of expressive freedom.

In many Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, the army has traditionally been a central pillar of the authoritarian regimes, responsible for the security and integrity of the state and a symbol of national sovereignty and social unity. Nevertheless, the 2011 Arab revolts witnessed stark differences in the response of the armies. This article argues that a relational reading of the Structure of Political Opportunities and Threats, particularly when its dimension of the state’s capacity and propensity for repression is informed by a MENA-salient regime feature—army embeddedness—offers a compelling solution to the puzzle. An analysis of the Egyptian, Syrian, and Libyan episodes of contention, based on a comparative method that combines mechanism-based process tracing and typological theorizing, demonstrates the theoretical payoffs of this sensitized dimension. Cross-case similarities underscore the value of thinking about the army as a full-fledge agent embedded within a web of relations with social and political forces. Specifically, findings reveal how army embeddedness shapes the respective operation and effect of the mechanisms “political opportunities” and “political threats,” and highlight the importance of differentiating between the state’s capacity and the state’s propensity for repression. Within-case variations highlight the historically specific development of such embeddedness and how it plays out distinctively in each case, forming different scenarios of high and low capacity and propensity for repression.

Scientists often surmise that scientific thought is a universal faculty akin to Kant’s description of “pure reason.” The conventional view insists that science should censor the passions and bar the intrusion of emotional and subconscious motives into scientific work. This article challenges this truism by showing that the split between reason and emotions is rather culturally mediated. Using interviews with 125 Israeli scientists who had collaborated with German colleagues, the study allowed respondents to compare their scientific practices and intellectual styles with those of their German compatriots. The results suggest that in contrast to their sober and uber-rational German colleagues, Israeli scientists’ intellectual style can be described as fiery, enflamed, and passionate. Indeed, they often spoke of “love” and “desire” as central elements that drive innovation and creativity in scientific discovery. Their minds, they implied, function through emotional reason.

The emergence of COVID-19 has led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy. To counter the perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities, some supporters of this orthodoxy have moved to censor those who promote dissenting views. The aim of the present study is to explore the experiences and responses of highly accomplished doctors and research scientists from different countries who have been targets of suppression and/or censorship following their publications and statements in relation to COVID-19 that challenge official views. Our findings point to the central role played by media organizations, and especially by information technology companies, in attempting to stifle debate over COVID-19 policy and measures. In the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position. In place of open and fair discussion, censorship and suppression of scientific dissent has deleterious and far-reaching implications for medicine, science, and public health.

This study analyses how the mutual imbrication of organizational and postcolonial power along with the micro-embedding of actors’ shape and structure power struggles in multinational corporations. Drawing on the case of news agency Reuters’ internationalization and centralization approach at its Indian subsidiaries in Mumbai and Bangalore, our research explores how subsidiaries mobilize resources to pursue their interests in a landscape shaped by clashing professional institutional logics and organizational control systems reflected in quality control and performance assessment. Our findings shows that the power struggle and (professional) identity position of both subsidiary staff differs as they face different organizational, institutional and (neo)colonial pressures and are othered in different ways. We argue that as a site of “value production,” both subsidiaries are qualified and disadvantaged in distinct ways. Our study emphasizes the importance of understanding diverse colonial experiences and the mainstreaming of postcolonial insights in the analysis of power in MNCs.

Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship examines how the legacies of colonial bureaucracy continue to shape political life after empire. Focusing on the former British colonies of India, Cyprus, and Israel/Palestine, the book explores how post-colonial states use their inherited administrative legacies to classify and distinguish between loyal and suspicious subjects and manage the movement of populations, thus shaping the practical meaning of citizenship and belonging within their new boundaries. The book offers a novel institutional theory of 'hybrid bureaucracy' to explain how racialized bureaucratic practices were used by powerful administrators in state organizations to shape the making of political identity and belonging in the new states. Combining sociology and anthropology of the state with the study of institutions, this book offers new knowledge to overturn conventional understandings of bureaucracy, demonstrating that routine bureaucratic practices and persistent colonial logics continue to shape unequal political status to this day.

This essay puts forward a theoretical framework for Palestinian Indigenous urbanism. It argues that the specific and diverse expressions of this urbanism are partly an outcome of the fact that Palestinian cities—as a modern urban form—predate the Zionist settler colonization of Palestine. We centre the longue durée of Palestinian urbanism as a constitutive mode for contemporary experiences of Palestinian citizens in Israel and link it to Israel's persistent attempts to erase the urban landscapes of Palestine, symbolically and materially. We discuss how the de-urbanization of Historic Palestinian cities in Israel since the beginning of the Nakba has drastically changed the urban and rural landscapes of these cities, ultimately leading Palestinians to adapt, develop and create new forms of urbanism in and around cities. Although Palestinians live in very different types of cities today, Palestinian urbanism broadly manifests as a presence of the absence, namely as the recursion of pre-1948 urban life. Thus, in this essay we provide a new lens through which to understand Indigenous urbanism as a recursive and relational anti-hegemonic structure that predates and can outlive settler-colonial violence.

Historian Albert Hourani once wrote that "the sources we use help to determine the emphasis we place within the complex whole of the historical process?'' No statement rings truer when describing Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War, the new book by Middle East historian, former journalist, and petitioner of the Israeli High Court of Justice Shay Hazkani. Admittedly, one must wonder why, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we require yet another historiographic endeavor tracing what is now one of the most evaluated historical events of the twentieth century: the 1948 Nakba/Israeli War of Independence. What could new work on the topic offer by way of added value? Upon concluding Dear Palestine, the answer to this question becomes clear.

We present a model of 19th Century population change in England & Wales. The model highlights contrasting demographic and economic processes in rural and urban sectors as core explanations for rural to urban migration, stemming from labor surpluses in the former and labor shortages in the latter. This massive migration transformed the geographic distribution of the population, in tandem with the economic transformation caused by the Industrial Revolution. We argue that demographic literature on historical population processes in England & Wales in the 19th Century has paid insufficient attention to the role of internal migration.