Nira Yuval-Davis

Nira Yuval-Davis, FAcSS (born August 22, 1943), is a British and diasporic Israeli sociologist, a professor emerita and Honorary Director of the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at the University of East London.[1]

Nira Yuval-Davis
Born (1943-08-22) August 22, 1943
Tel-Aviv, Israel
NationalityBritish, Israeli
AwardsInternational Sociological Association Award for Excellence in Research and Practice (2018)
Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences
Academic background
EducationHebrew University of Jerusalem (BA, 1966; MA, 1972)
University of Sussex (PhD, 1979)
Academic work
DisciplineSociologist
Institutions

In 2018, she won the International Sociological Association Award for Excellence in Research and Practice.[2] She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Early life and education

Nira Yuval-Davis was born in Tel-Aviv to a Labour Zionist family.[3] She has one sister, Ora Sperber. Her parents, Itzhak and Rivka, migrated to Mandatory Palestine in the early 1930s. During WWII their families and community in Alytus, Lithuania, were murdered by the Nazis and their local helpers in the nearby woods. Nira Yuval-Davis grew up as part of a tight labour Zionist community in the heart of Tel-Aviv, during the 1950s.

As a student of sociology and psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Yuval-Davis started her political activism, against the military government of the Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as the ‘religious coercion’ and non-separation of religion and the state in Israel. During this period, she met her first husband, Uri Davis. After the 1967 Six-Day War, the activism of Yuval-Davis and others (her husband and close friends) focused primarily on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Her MA dissertation was an ethnographic study of the anti-Zionist Socialist Israeli organization Matzpen in 1977 in Hebrew. In 1979, Yuval-Davis joined her husband in a lecture tour in United States of America against the Israeli occupation. The tour was organized by the Jewish Peace Fellowship and brought Yuval-Davis in touch with different Jewish radical political movements which constituted part of the more general civil rights, anti-Vietnam and growing feminist movement in the USA at the time. These connections influenced Yuval-Davis's research orientation. She began to work on a PhD dissertation examining how different new Jewish movements in the USA in the period of 1967 to 73 constructed their Jewishness in relation to wider social issues.[4] After the birth of her son in 1973, Yuval-Davis moved to London. However, shortly after, for combined personal and political reasons, her first marriage ended. She transferred her PhD studies to University of Sussex, where she graduated in 1979.

Political activism

Yuval-Davis continued her political activism while living in London. Shortly after arrival she joined a group of anti-Zionist socialist Israelis living in London who, a couple of years later, joined Palestinians and other Arab socialists to establish the journal and publication forum Khamsin.[5] She has continued to be active in this area. In 1984, as part of a combined academic and political tour in Australia, she met her second husband, Alain Hertzmann, who coordinated the local group JAZA (Jews against Zionism and Antisemitism). He moved to live with her in London a year later.

Yuval-Davis has been active in a range of local issues, mainly as part of feminist anti-racist forums such as WING (Women, Immigration and Nationality Group),[6][7] the European Socialist Feminist Group, Big Flame and from 1989, following the Salman Rushdie Affair, as a co-founder of Women Against Fundamentalism [8] which had by then transformed to the editorial collective of the online journal Feminist Dissent.[9] She was a founding member of the international research group on women in militarized conflict zones. In the 1990s, She became involved in the NGO Forums of the UN conferences on human rights, reproductive rights and women's rights, and worked as a consultant for Amnesty International, Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID), the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, and was part of an investigative women's delegation to the Gujarat after the pogroms against Muslims in 2003.[10][11][12]

In 2019, she joined the Labour Party and the Jewish Voice for Labour. and was a founder member of SSAHE (Social Scientists Against the Hostile Environment)

Teaching and research

After part-time teaching as a student in Israel and the US, Yuval-Davis started working as a full-time lecturer in sociology in 1974 at Thames Polytechnic, which later became the University of Greenwich.[13] She resigned from University of Greenwich in 2003, in protest against the ‘restructuring’ that was taking place and moved on to the University of East London (UEL). After moving to UEL, she transferred Post-Graduate Gender and Ethnic Studies programmes to UEL, where she also found and co-directed the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB).[14] Her co-authored article on 'Everyday Bordering' won the 2019 Sage Sociology award for excellence and Innovation.[15]

She was elected as a fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences in 2003.[16] She was an appointed member of the 2008 RAE (UK national Research Assessment Exercise) and of the 2014 REF (UK national Research Excellence Framework) Sociology sub-panels. Among her major funded research projects Nira Yuval-Davis have been the 1994-7 ESRC research on Anti-Jewish & Anti-Arab Racialized Discourses in Britain and France; the 2004 Rockefeller fellowship on Human Security, Gender and Globalisation;[17] the 2005 – 2008 project on Identity, Performance and Social Action: The Use of Community Theatre Among Refugees, a major ESRC award as part of their research programme on Identities and Social Action; the 2012-2016 EU RF07 research programme on EUBorderscapes and the 2020 Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship on ‘Climate Change and the Politics of Belonging’.

Main research interests

‘Zionism, Antisemitism and the Struggle against Racism’ (Spare Rib, 1984; reprinted in Feminist Review, 2019) represents probably in the most comprehensive and relational way the area of work which has preoccupied N Y-D since starting her scholarly work. Being preoccupied with questions of social justice and social inequality, she thought to understand the Zionist project which established the Israeli state in which she grew up in relation to the Palestinians, on the one hand (eg 1975, 1982) and racism and antisemitism towards Jews in the diaspora (eg 1979) on the other hand. However, her basic approach was against analytical exceptionalism and thus she explored Zionism in the context of other settler colonial societies (eg, 1995) and antisemitism in the context of other forms of racialization (eg 1992, 2020). This is also where she started to be known for applying a gender analysis to issues which have tended, until then, to be analyzed in a gender-blind way.

N Y-D’ probably most known work (which was also translated into ten languages) has been her Gender and Nation book (Sage 1997, but see also, for example 1983 and 1989). In this book she attacks the gender blindness of most theories of nationalism and analyses the ways gender relations affect and are affected by national projects and processes. In particular, she studies the roles of women as biological reproducers of the nation, as its cultural reproducers and symbolic border-guards and as citizens and soldiers.

Politics of Belonging: Intersectional contestations (Sage, 2011) includes the most comprehensive analytical framework of N Y-D’s work. Rather than just focusing on nations and nationalisms, she explores what she considers the major contemporary political projects of belonging – state citizenship; national (including indigenous, racialised and diasporic) belongings; religion and fundamentalist political movements; cosmopolitanism and human rights; and feminist politics of care.

Bordering (Polity, 2019, with G. Wemyss & K. Cassidy) explores the exclusionary aspects of belonging and examines the ways intersected political projects of governance and belonging have come, at the age of globalisation, to paradoxically apply processes of everyday bordering in all social spheres in ways which affect all members of society, not just the marginalized Others. The uncertainties arising from these processes mean that more and more people find themselves living in grey zones, excluded from any form of protection and human rights.

‘Situated Intersectionality and Social Inequality’ (Raisons Politiques no. 58:91-100, 2015) has been the analytical and methodological approach that can be found in the Bordering book and in the rest of N Y-D’s work. She started to develop it in the 1980’s and can be found also in her collaborative works, for example with F. Anthias (1983; 1992; G. Sahgal (1992); D. Stasiulis (1995); P. Werbner (1999) and S. Dhaliwal, 2014). Situated intersectionality relates to the distribution of power and other resources. It does not reduce the complexity of power constructions into a single social division, but rather views different social divisions such as class, gender, race and ethnicity, stage in the life cycle, citizenship status etc, as constituting and shaping each other in specific historical, locational and personal contexts. It is based on a dialogical epistemological approach which requires encompassing the situated gazes of people differentially positioned in society in order to fully understand particular social reality. References [for the works which are not fully referenced above]

Israel and The Palestinians, edited with U. Davis and A. Mack, Ithaca Press, London 1975. The New Jewish Movement: Jewish Nationalism and Radical Politics in The USA 1967-1973, Ph.D. Thesis, Sussex University, 1979.

"The Bearers of the Collective: Women and Religious Legislation in Israel", Feminist Review, no. 4, 1980, pp. 15-27. Israeli Women and Men: Divisions Behind The Unity, Change Publications, London 1982.

"Contextualizing Feminism: Gender, Ethnic & Class divisions", with F. Anthias, Feminist Review, No 15, November 1983, pp.62-75. Woman - Nation - State, edited with F. Anthias, MacMillan, 1989

Racialised Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle, co-authored with F. Anthias, Routledge, 1992

Refusing Holy Orders: Women and Fundamentalism in Britain, edited with G. Sahgal, Virago Press, 1992 Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Ethnicity, Race and Class, edited with D. Stasiulis, Sage, 1995

Women, Citizenship and Difference, edited with P. Werbner, Z Books, 1999

Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity, edited with Sukhwant Dhaliwal, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2014

‘Feminism, antisemitism and the question of Palestine/Israel’, in Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today, ed, by K. Fakler, D. Mulinari & N. Ratzel, Zed Books pp.249-260

Selected bibliography
  • Bordering. John Wiley & Sons. 2019. ISBN 978-1-5095-0498-5.[18][19]
  • Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity, edited with Sukhwant Dhaliwal, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2014[20][21][22][23][24][25]
  • The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. SAGE. (2011) ISBN 978-1-4129-2130-5.[26][27][28][29]
  • Gender and Nation. SAGE Publications. (1997).[30][31]
  • Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Ethnicity, Race and Class, edited with D. Stasiulis, Sage, 1995[32]
  • Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-racist Struggle. Routledge. 1992. ISBN 978-0-415-10388-6.[33]
  • Woman-Nation-State. Palgrave Macmillan UK. 1989. ISBN 978-0-333-45803-7.[34][35][36]

Nira Yuval-Davis writings have been translated to more than ten languages.

References
  1. "Professor Nira Yuval-Davis". University of East London (UEL).
  2. "ISA Award for Excellence in Research and Practice".
  3. Barnett, by Adam. "Women who braved Satanic Verses 'fatwa' launch book in Bethnal Green". East London Advertiser.
  4. Yuval-Davis, Nira (1979). The New Jewish Movement: Jewish Nationalism and Radical Politics in The USA 1967-1973 (PhD). Sussex University.
  5. Kadi, Leila; Lobel, Eli, eds. (1975). "Khamsin". Paris. Cite magazine requires |magazine= (help) Khamsin: https://libcom.org/library/khamsin-journal-revolutionary-socialists-middle-east
  6. Bhabha, Jacqueline; Klug, Francesca; Shutter, Sue, eds. (1985). Worlds Apart: Women under Immigration and Nationality Law. Pluto Press. ISBN 0745300219.
  7. Yuval-Davis, Nira (1991). "The Citizenship Debate: Women, Ethnic Processes and the State". Feminist Review (39): 58–68. doi:10.2307/1395439. JSTOR 1395439.
  8. Dhaliwal, Sukhwant; Yuval-Davis, Nira, eds. (2014). Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ISBN 9781909831025.
  9. Feminist Dissent: https://journals.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/feministdissent
  10. "The silent wounds of Gujarat". openDemocracy.
  11. "Interview with Professor Nira Yuval‐Davis: After Gender and Nation". Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. 9 (1): 128–138. 2009. doi:10.1111/j.1754-9469.2009.01034.x.
  12. International Initiative for Justice (2003). Threatened Existence: A Feminist Analysis of the Genocide in Gujarat (with other members of the International Initiative for Justice in Gujarat team) (Report). Forum against Oppression of Women. p. 197. Retrieved 28 January 2019.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link)
  13. Benn, Melissa (27 July 2000). "Sisters of mercy". The Guardian.
  14. "Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging". University of East London. Retrieved 28 January 2019.
  15. "SAGE Prize for Innovation/Excellence - Winners Archive". British Sociological Association.
  16. "Professor Nira Yuval-Davis FAcSS". Academy of Social Sciences.
  17. "Nira Yuval-Davis' Paper". University of Warwick.
  18. Reznikova, Sylva (1 June 2019). "Book review: Nira Yuval-Davis, Georgie Wemyss and Kathryn Cassidy (eds), Racialized Bordering Discourses on European Roma". Discourse & Communication. 13 (3): 371–373. doi:10.1177/1750481319828435a. S2CID 151022513.
  19. Pettersson, Johanna (14 February 2020). "Bordering". Journal of Borderlands Studies: 1–2. doi:10.1080/08865655.2020.1727764.
  20. Moghissi, Haideh (3 July 2015). "Sukhwant Dhaliwal and Nira Yuval-Davis (Eds). Women against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity". International Feminist Journal of Politics. 17 (3): 522–524. doi:10.1080/14616742.2015.1055138. S2CID 147658731.
  21. Turkarslan, Gizem (1 May 2017). "Book Review: Sukhwant Dhaliwal and Nira Yuval-Davis (Eds), Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity". Political Studies Review. 15 (2): 300. doi:10.1177/1478929917689956. S2CID 151957285.
  22. "Book Review: Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity". Open Media Boston.
  23. Dhaliwal, Sukhwant (2014). "Women against fundamentalism: 25 years of anti-racist, anti-fundamentalist feminism". Feminist Review. 108 (108): 81–89. doi:10.1057/fr.2014.28. JSTOR 24571922. S2CID 144767771.
  24. "Book Review: Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity". Left Foot Forward. 18 January 2015.
  25. "Book Review: Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity". British Muslims for Secular Democracy.
  26. Gül, Duygu (2012). "Reviewed work: The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations, Nira Yuval-Davis". The Canadian Journal of Sociology. 37 (3): 349–351. doi:10.29173/cjs18231.
  27. Hoewer, Melanie (December 2014). "The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations by Nira Yuval Davis, Sage". Gender, Sexuality & Feminism. 1 (2). doi:10.3998/gsf.12220332.0001.207.
  28. Arat, Zehra F. Kabasakal (3 July 2014). "Nira Yuval-Davis. The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations". International Feminist Journal of Politics. 16 (3): 530–532. doi:10.1080/14616742.2014.923241.
  29. Perry, Gillian Hutchison (2013). "The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations by Nira Yuval-Davis. London: Sage, 2011. 252pp., £25.99, ISBN 978 1 4129 2130 5": 251. doi:10.1111/1478-9302.12016_40. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  30. Davis, Uri (2002). "Review of Gender and Nation": 776–778. JSTOR 3993489. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  31. Gayathri, V. (1 September 1999). "Book Reviews : Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation. London: Sage Publications,1997.157 pages. $12.95 (paperback)". Indian Journal of Gender Studies. 6 (2): 331–332. doi:10.1177/097152159900600212. S2CID 144202841.
  32. Sum, Ngai-Ling. "Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class". Journal of Gender Studies.
  33. Lutz, Helma (1 May 1994). "Book Reviews : Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle London & New York: Routledge, 1992, 226 pp., ISBN 0-415-01813-7". European Journal of Women's Studies. 1: 128–130. doi:10.1177/135050689400100119. S2CID 144390552.
  34. Bourne, Jenny (1 April 1990). "Book reviews : Woman - Nation - State Edited by NIRA YUVAL-DAVIS and FLOYA ANTHIAS (Lon don, Macmillan, 1989). 185pp. £29.50 hb, £12.99, pb". Race & Class. 31 (4): 103–105. doi:10.1177/030639689003100414. S2CID 143951692.
  35. Walker, Cherryl (1 January 1990). "Woman-Nation-State". Agenda. 6 (6): 40–48. doi:10.1080/10130950.1990.9675078 (inactive 2021-01-14).CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2021 (link)
  36. Rossiter, Ann (1990). "Review of Woman-Nation-State": 131–134. doi:10.2307/1395119. JSTOR 1395119. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
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