Dr Ben Kasstan
Lady Davis Research Fellow
Department of Sociology & Anthropology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr Lea Taragin-Zeller
Research Fellow
Woolf Institute and ReproSoc (Reproductive Sociology Research Group), University of Cambridge
Professor Dr Hansjörg Dilger
Head of the Medical Anthropology Research Area
Institute of Social Anthropology, Frei Univesität Berlin
Professor Dr Nurit Stadler
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology & Anthropology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Professor Dr Netta Barak-Corren
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Professor Dr Yael Hashiloni-Dolev
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Bat Sheva Hass
PhD candidate
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Professor Dr Claudia Liebelt
Assistant Professor
Social Anthropology, University of Bayreuth
Dr Mirjam Lücking
Postdoctoral Fellow
Martin Buber Society of Fellows, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr Dominik Mattes
Postdoctoral Fellow
Collaborative Research Center 'Affective Societies' and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin
Ursula Probst
PhD Candidate
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin
Dr Vanessa Rau
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religion & Ethnic Diversity
Dr Nasima Selim
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin
Dr Guy Shalev
Postdoctoral Fellow
Martin Buber Society of Fellows, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr Anita von Poser
Postdoctoral Researcher
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin
Edda Willamowski
Research Associate
Affective Societies, Freie Universität Berlin
Professor Dr Tanya Zion-Waldoks
Lecturer
Seymour Fox School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Lady Davis Research Fellow
Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Further information: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/435569
Ben Kasstan is a medical anthropologist by training, and his research interests sit at the intersection of state, health and religion. For the past seven years Ben has been exploring how areas of sexuality and reproduction emerge as public (health) anxieties and as sites of intervention, especially concerning ethnic and religious minorities. The particular areas of controversy that Ben focuses on are abortion, vaccinations and equality/inclusion. Together with Lea Taragin-Zeller, Ben will be investigating the representation of ‘non-compliant’ communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a public anthropologist, Ben uses academic research to pursue social justice in public life and has appeared on the BBC World Service and has commented in Ha’aretz, Times of Israel, The Independent, Evening Standard, and NewsWeek. Ben is part of the editorial team at Anthropology & Medicine.
Selected publications:
Research Fellow
Woolf Institute and ReproSoc (Reproductive Sociology Research Group), University of Cambridge
https://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/people/lea-taragin-zeller; https://www.reprosoc.sociology.cam.ac.uk/directory/lea-taragin-zeller
Bio
Lea Taragin-Zeller is a social anthropologist. Situated at the intersection of the anthropology of religion, gender and bio-medicine, Lea’s research explores how ‘secular’ and scientific knowledge is negotiated among ethnic and faith minorities, influencing their decisions and raising new ethical dilemmas. More specifically, her research explores how religious minorities in both Israel (especially ultra-Orthodox Jews) and the UK (Jews and Muslims) integrate and reconcile frameworks of gender equality and science knowledge alongside faith, religious theology and authority. From contraception to abortions to genetic testing, she examines everyday decision-making vis-à-vis state-minority relations and transnational gender power dynamics. Lea is currently working on a new research project on Religion, Public Health and COVID-19 (together with Dr. Ben Kasstan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem). She is also a member of the interdisciplinary research group :”“Communicating Science among the Jewish Ultra-Orthodox in Israel: Journalistic Praxis and Audience Reception in Insular Communities” (together with Prof. Ayelet Baram-Tsabari, Technion; Yael Rosenblum, Technion; Prof. Oren Golan and Prof. Yariv Tsfati, University of Haifa, funded by Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology). She has published in Medical Anthropology, Anthropology and Education Quarterly and serves as a section editor in Cambridge's journal of Reproductive Biomedicine and Society Online.
Selected publications:
Additional link: https://cambridge.academia.edu/LeaTaraginZeller; https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lea_Taragin-Zeller
Head of the Medical Anthropology Research Area
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin
https://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/en/ethnologie/personen/professorinnen/dilger.html>
Hansjörg Dilger’s research interests include medical anthropology and global health, religion and religious diversity, schools and education, transnationalism and migration, and urban anthropology. Regionally, his research focuses on eastern and southern Africa as well as on migratory contexts in Germany. Between 1995 and 2006, Dilger conducted long-term fieldwork on HIV/AIDS and social relations in Tanzania, focusing on the dynamics of kinship- and church-based support in the context of rural-urban migration as well as on the identity politics and the limitations of collective action in urban NGOs. His more recent research on neo-Pentecostal churches and revivalist Muslim organizations in Dar es Salaam has explored the dynamics of moral and religious belonging, charismatic healing and body practices, and processes of spatialization and institutionalization in religiously diverse settings. Since 2015, Dilger has been part of a collective of refugee women, students, lecturers, and activists that has worked and published on the situations and experiences of female refugees in Berlin. Dilger is PI of the following ongoing research projects (all funded by German Research Foundation, DFG): "Governing Religious Diversity in Berlin: Affective Dynamics of In- and Exclusion in Urban Space" (within the collaborative research centre "Affective Societies", with Omar Kasmani and Dominik Mattes); "Religious Reform, Faith-Based Development and the Public Sphere in Sub-Saharan Africa (Lagos, Dar es Salaam and Cape Town)" (together with Abdulkader Tayob, University of Cape Town, Felician Tungaraza, University of Dar es Salaam, and Marloes Janson, SOAS University of London); and "Productive Pathologies: Professional Patients and the Commodification of Illness in Egypt" (with Mustafa Abdalla).
Selected publications:
Additional link: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hansjoerg_Dilger>
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
https://en.sociology.huji.ac.il/people/norit-stadler
Nurit Stadler’s research interests include fundamentalism, the Ultra-orthodox community, Greek-Orthodox and Roman Catholic rituals in Jerusalem, text-based communities, the veneration of Mary in Israel/Palestine, and the study of female saint shrines, sacred nature and sacred iconography. Stadler is the author of three books: Yeshiva Fundamentalism: Piety, Gender and Resistance in the Ultra-Orthodox World published with New York University Press, in 2008. This book is an analysis of the reconstruction of masculine in the fundamentalist world as a result of the challenges of modernity. It addresses these questions through an investigation of the redefinition of the family, work, the army and civil society in the Ultra-Orthodox yeshiva world in Israel. Stadler is also the author of A Well-Worn Tallus for a New Ceremony (2012) with Academic Studies Press (Brighton, MA). In this book she explored new aspects of voluntarism, citizenship, family life and the concept of freedom in the ultraorthodox culture today. Her third book Voices of the Ritual (Oxford University Press 2020) analyzes the revival of and manifestation of rituals at female saint shrines in the Holy Land. Since 2012 she has been involved with the project on sacred shrines in Israel/Palestine. In this project she studies various aspects of pilgrimage and veneration of sacred shrines, especially female shrines. Her comparative study of these shrines opens a set of questions about the centrality of fertility cults and female landscape at the age of modernity and technology of reproduction. Stadler is directing an Ethnographic Lab on issues of religion, sacredness, politics, borders and the nation state. In this, project students and researchers from around the world participate in studying and comparing ethnographies of sacred places.
Selected publications:
Additional link: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nurit_Stadler; https://huji.academia.edu/NuritStadler
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
https://en.law.huji.ac.il/people/netta-barak-corren
Netta Barak-Corren is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her first dual-major degree in Law and Cognitive Science from the Hebrew University as the Valedictorian of her class and her Doctorate in Law from Harvard University. Netta’s research centers around empirical and behavioral analysis of public and constitutional law. She is particularly interested in questions relating to law and religion, equality, and conflicts of norms, both at the individual and societal levels. Her research won numerous grants and awards, most notably the Gorni Prize for an Outstanding Junior Faculty in Public Law, the Birk prize for Excellence in Legal Studies, Stanford’s International Junior Faculty Forum, Harvard’s Sinclair Kennedy Fellowship, the Howard Raiffa Best Paper Prize, the Fisher-Sander Best Paper Prize, and the Menachem Goldberg Best Paper Award. Prior to academia, Netta clerked for the Chief Justice of Israeli Supreme Court, Hon. Dorit Beinish.
Selected publications:
Additional link: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Netta_Barak-Corren
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
https://in.bgu.ac.il/humsos/soc-ant/en/pages/staff/yaelhd-en.aspx
Yael Hashiloni-Dolev is a sociologist of health and illness. She is a member of Israel’s National Bioethics Council and a co-president of the Israeli Society for the History & Philosophy of Science. Her areas of interest include new reproductive technologies, genetics, gender, bioethics, contemporary parenthood and posthumous reproduction. She has authored three books: A Life (Un)Worthy of Living: Reproductive Genetics in Israel and Germany (Springer, 2007), The Fertility Revolution (Modan, 2013, in Hebrew), and New Reproductive Technologies: Social and Bio-Ethical Debates (Open University, in Hebrew). She published many articles on reprogenetics, sex selection, the moral status of the embryo and cryo-preservation. She is also a co-editor of Boas, H., Hashiloni-Dolev, Y., Davidovitch, N., Filc D. and Lavi, S. (Eds). 2018. Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-Legal, Political and Empirical Analysis. Cambridge University Press.
Selected publications:
Additional link: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yael_Hashiloni-Dolev
PhD candidate
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
https://sociology.huji.ac.il/people/בת-שבע-הס-0
Bat-sheva Hass is a PhD candidate at the department of Sociology and Anthropology, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her main focus has been on anthropology of religion, anthropology of conversion, gender and religion. Specifically, her dissertation is an integration between anthropology of conversion, anthropology of religion, the politics of belonging, and politics of identity. The case study she is undertaking is a story of Dutch women who converted to Islam and how they perceive their sense of identity and belonging in their current and former lifestyles. In addition, Bat sheva works as a teaching assistant and teaches introduction to qualitative methodology at the department of sociology and anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Bat sheva also works as the ERC coordinator at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Currently she coordinates two ERC projects: Digital Values and Mediating the Future: The Social Dynamics of Public Projections- PROFECI. On both projects she is in charge of the budgets, does administrative as well as academic tasks, including quantitative coding etc.
Selected publications:
Assistant Professor
Social Anthropology, University of Bayreuth
https://www.ethnologie.uni-bayreuth.de/de/team/Liebelt-Claudia/index.php
Claudia Liebelt’s research foci are in the Anthopology of the Body and the Senses, Political Anthropology, Gender and Sexualities, Care and Intimate Labour, as well as Islam and Secularity. Claudia is especially interested in debates on the biopolitics of beauty, embodied normativities, postsecularism, new materialities, as well as categorizations of race, class and gender, with a regional focus on the Middle East and Northern Africa. As part of a Heisenberg Position at the University of Bayreuth, she is currently conducting research on the "Olfactories of Hygiene," that is, the social configurations of bodily hygiene, smell, and the role of hand sanitizers during the COVID-19 pandemics in Turkey and Germany.
Selected publications:
Additional links: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Claudia_Liebelt2; https://uni-bayreuth.academia.edu/ClaudiaLiebelt
Postdoctoral Fellow
Martin Buber Society of Fellows, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
https://buberfellows.huji.ac.il/people/mirjam-lücking
Mirjam Lücking is an anthropologist, working on contemporary expressions of religion and politics in Indonesia and the Middle East, with ethnographic research on various forms of transnational mobility, such as pilgrimage, tourism, and labor migration. She is currently affiliated with the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Selected publications:
Additional link: https://shamash.academia.edu/MirjamL%C3%BCcking
Postdoctoral Fellow
Collaborative Research Center 'Affective Societies' and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin
https://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/en/ethnologie/personen/wiss_mitarb_u_koord_aus_drittmitteln/mattes.html
Dominik Mattes is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2014, he has been co-chairing the German Anthropological Association’s Work Group Medical Anthropology. His book, Fierce Medicines, Fragile Socialities. Grounding Global HIV Treatment in Tanzania (Berghahn, 2019) examines the political-economic conditions of providing antiretroviral medicines, the manifold intricacies of living a life with these pharmaceuticals, and the interference of religious discourse and practice with the biomedical therapy in Northeastern Tanzania. Aside from Medical Anthropology and Critical Global Health, Dominik’s work is situated at the intersection of religion and migration. While his first postdoctoral project explored notions of belonging among the congregants of a West-African Pentecostal church in Berlin, his current research focuses on how migration-related religious diversity is affectively governed in the same city.
Selected publications:
Additional links: https://www.researchgate.net/search.Search.html?type=researcher&query=Dominik%20Mattes; https://fu-berlin.academia.edu/DominikMattes
PhD Candidate
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin
https://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/ethnologie/personen/doktorand_innen/probst.html
Ursula Probst is a PhD student at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology (Freie Universität Berlin) investigating (labour) migration, the social production of bodies, and health in urban settings with a particular focus on the commercialisation of sexuality, intimate labor and the sex industry. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with migrants from Eastern Europe who are/were working in different sectors of the sex industry in Berlin, she is currently analysing the racialised and sexualised dimensions of so-called "Europeanisation" processes and (Eastern) European (non-)belongings as an embodied practice.
Selected publications:
Additional links: https://fu-berlin.academia.edu/UrsulaProbst; https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ursula_Probst
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religion & Ethnic Diversity
https://www.mmg.mpg.de/person/99020
Vanessa Rau is an interdisciplinary social scientist/sociologist with a special interest in Religion and Secularism, Migration and the Politics of Difference. Her current research concerns, “Civil Society Organizations and the Challenges of Migration and Diversity: Agents of Change” especially in the Kontext of “Disability and Sexual Minorities”. Vanessa completed her PhD at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and focused on migration and diaspora, religion, secularities and the politics of identity in diverse urban spaces. Her dissertation “Contesting the Secular and Converting Space in Berlin? Becoming Jewish in an Urban Scene” examines a newly emerging Jewish-Hebrew scene in Berlin and investigates how religious and secular belonging are negotiated under specific discursive representations. Vanessa holds a BA and a PhD from the University of Cambridge as well as a MA from Humboldt and Freie Universität, Berlin.
Selected publications:
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin
https://www.visual-anthropology.fu-berlin.de/staff/External_Lecturer1/Selim/index.html
Nasima Selim holds a doctoral degree in Social and Cultural anthropology from the Freie Universität Berlin. She is a former mental health physician with two master’s degrees, in medical anthropology and public health. Her research and teaching interests include healing across religion and medicine, global health and well-being, affective ecologies, migratory practices, ethnographic theories, methods, and writing. Nasima is a spokesperson of the working group public anthropology and a member of the working group medical anthropology at the German Anthropological Association. She is a lifetime member of the Public Health Association of Bangladesh and a member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Nasima is a member of the editorial team of #Witnessing Corona, a collaborative blog-series launched in March 2020.
Selected publications:
Additional link: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nasima_Selim
Postdoctoral Fellow
Martin Buber Society of Fellows, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
https://buberfellows.huji.ac.il/people/guy-shalev
Guy Shalev is a medical anthropologist interested in the intersections of professional and national politics in the Israeli health sphere. His research considers the everyday border-work that marks the lives of Palestinian physicians in the Israeli public health system and ask how medical expertise and ethics play a role in ethnonational politics both within and without the medical field.
Selected publication:
Additional link: https://unc.academia.edu/guyshalev
Postdoctoral Researcher
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin
https://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/en/ethnologie/forschung/arbeitsstellen/anthropologie_der_emotionen/personen/poser-anita/index.html
Anita von Poser’s research interests pertain to the field of psychological anthropology with a special focus on affects, emotions, belonging, and empathy as well as migration, aging, care, and the life course. Her current research involves ethnographic research with Vietnamese-born social workers in Berlin as well as trans-disciplinary collaborative work on the affective efforts of migration in clinical settings and everyday lifeworlds with colleagues from the field of cultural psychiatry and global mental health.
Selected publications:
Additional link: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anita_Poser
Research Associate
Affective Societies, Freie Universität Berlin
https://fu-berlin.academia.edu/EddaHeyken
Edda Willamowski is a Sociocultural Anthropologist trained at Freie Universität Berlin, University of Münster and Radboud University Nijmegen. In her dissertation, she analyzes the complex interconnections of affects, belonging, memory, and silence in the lives of elderly Vietnamese refugees from a psychological-anthropological perspective. Since 2015, she has been Research Associate of the Collaborative Research Center 1171 Affective Societies: Dynamics of Social Co-existence in Mobile Worlds, where she works within an anthropological-psychiatric research project as part of a collaboration between FU Berlin and Charité Berlin.
Selected publications:
Additional links: https://fu-berlin.academia.edu/EddaHeyken; https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Edda_Heyken