Orit Gazit
Latest Updates
Migration and Displacement in Post-October 7th Israel
Our new special issue of 'Israeli Readings' has just been published, co-edited with my colleague Halleli Pinson (Ben-Gurion University), with Editors-in-Chief Tamar Herman and Edna Lomsky-Feder.
This issue addresses migration and displacement in post-October 7th Israel through the themes of home and unhomeliness, while providing a snapshot of the diverse and original ways in which the phenomena of migration and displacement are currently being researched in the Israeli arena, including:
· Migration and the non-human: ranging from artifacts and material culture to the migration of invasive biological species;
· Temporality: Time as both a shaper and an actor in migration processes;
· Urban Geographies: The intersection of mobility, urban citizenship, and questions of status, power, and urban displacement.
This special issue includes exceptional contributions by Adriana Kemp, Towibah Majdub, Julia Lerner, Liron Shani, Erez Tzfadia, Moti Gigi, Ravit Talmi-Cohen, Svetlana Chachashvili-Bolotin, Nir Avieli, Anastasia Gorodzeisky, Yariv Feniger, Hanna Ayalon, Yael Grinshtain, Eyal Bar-Haim, Hilla Zaban, Riki Antebi, Noa Bloch, Maskit Hodesman, Ortal Slobodin, Asaf Meshulam, Idit Fast, Orit Unger, Rotem Zamir, Hanoch Ben-Pazi, Yael Meir and Lior Yohanani.
On June 4, 2026, I chaired a roundtable, together with my collegues, on Emotions in IR at the Israeli Association for International Studies (IAIS) annual convention, hosted this year by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations.
How do benign place names (toponyms) in contested cities transform into a threat to a group's Ontological Security (OS)? And what can we learn from these dynamics regarding the symbolic aspects of conflicts more generally?
In a new article published in Global Studies Quarterly, Oren Barak and I use multiple methods (walking as method and participatory IR, ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and textual analysis) to trace the various formal and informal ontological security-seeking strategies that diverse actors (street residents, business owners, municipal bureaucrats, passers-by, and civic and political activists) adopted to manage and contain the ontological insecurity emanating from the toponym 'Gaza Street' in Jerusalem in recent decades.
In the upcoming conference of the Israeli Sociological Association on February 2025, Oren Barak (Hebrew University) and I will be co-chairing a panel on the post-October 7th symbolic landscape in Israel, and presenting our new study on "Ontoligical Insecurity, Abject Toponyms, and the Attempts to Normalize Gaza Street in Jerusalem".
Open Call for Articles - Special Issue on Migration & Refugees in the Israeli-Palestinian Space (Hebrew)
We invite contributions on: space, borders & mobility in Israel | migration & insecurity | the securitization of migration | migration & identity | & more
Deadline for abstracts: March 15, 2025
Guest Editors of the Special Issue:
Professor Halleli Pinson |
Dr. Orit Gazit
Editors in Chief:
Professor Edna Lomsky-Feder |
Professor Tamar Herman
Could the quest for ontological security (OS) unfold together with the quest for physical security (i.e., survival)? In a new article published in Conflict, Security & Development (2024), Skyler Inman and I demonstrate how in circumstances of endemic statist violence and forced migration, these quests could be closely intertwined and often reinforce each other.
On July 2023, I will be presenting my new study on Darfurian asylum-seekers in Israel at a conference on environmental and climate mobilities at the University of Vienna.
Join Us! The Glocal Program in International Development, together with the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and the Davis Institute for International Relations are hosting an academic conference on the highly significant topic of Climate Refugees. The conference will take place June 15, 2023 at the Maeirsdorf faculty club, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The conference will address environmental migration from a multidisciplinary perspective, bringing together sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, economists, political scientists and legal scholars. We will discuss global aspects of environmental mobility as well as the Israeli and Middle-Eastern contexts.
A new study on visual IR, the IR book cover and the imaginary of the field, co-authored with Oded Lowenheim, will be presented in the upcoming annual ISA convention in Montreal, March 2023.
