New Article: Paz, Biopolitics and Public Opinion in Recognizing Non-Citizen Children in Israel

Paz, Alejandro I. “Speaking like a Citizen: Biopolitics and Public Opinion in Recognizing Non-Citizen Children in Israel.” Language & Communication 48 (2016): 18-27.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2016.01.002

 

Abstract

This paper examines the public sphere process by which non-citizen children of labor migrants came to be recognized as Israeli citizens. In response to a public campaign, three government resolutions were issued in the 2000s to provide Israeli citizenship for these young non-citizens. Generally, studies of non-citizen migrants have emphasized their deportability and illegality as the primary aspect of the biopolitics of contemporary citizenship. On the other hand, I draw attention to the mass mediated process from which public opinion emerges to set the boundary between citizen and non-citizen. To describe this, I examine the pragmatics of voicing non-citizen children in public discourse. I also describe how legal documentation became the semiotic technology through which public opinion was rationalized bureaucratically.

 

 

 

New Article: Kravel-Tovi, Religious Conversion, Change, and Exchange in Israel

Kravel-Tovi, Michal. “Bureaucratic Gifts: Religious Conversion, Change, and Exchange in Israel.” American Ethnologist 41.4 (2014): 714-27.

 

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12107/abstract

 

Abstract

Viewing religious conversion through the lens of exchange rather than change calls attention to the web of interactions, practices, and discourses that constitute conversion as a relational domain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that straddles the institutionalized interface of state-run Jewish conversion in Israel, I show how the conversion process constitutes a reciprocal transaction by which each party to the exchange—the state and its subjects—provides the other with national recognition while also receiving and thus validating its own national identity. I trace the historical and political circumstances that have entangled the Jewish state and a significant cohort of Jewish converts within this reciprocal relationship. In doing so, I identify the biopolitical, moral, and bureaucratic frameworks that bear on this institutional transaction.