At the heart of my work is an inquiry into the processes by which a sense of belonging is nurtured among new members of society, namely immigrants and children. I am interested in the ways in which time shapes this enterprise, viewing temporal order and ordering as crucial to its unfolding, rather than mere backdrop. As a social anthropologist, I adhere to a comparative perspective: my work addresses the ways in which global understandings about the socialization of newcomers – be these immigrants or children - interweave with understandings and practices emerging out of local concerns
Within this broad framework, the first strand of my work addresses the ways in which the host society seeks to prepare immigrants for their new lives. My doctoral study, based on fieldwork among newcomers in Israel from the former Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s, reversed the common research agenda by turning a scholarly gaze onto the receiving society rather than onto the immigrants themselves. This study, and subsequent elaborations, looked at Israelis' notions concerning what sort of people the newcomers have to be, or become, in order to be seen as worthy of belonging. What qualities, biographies, sense of the past, and anticipation towards the future, are considered proof of moral worthiness, and what transformations do the ewcomers have to undergo in order to be seen to incorporate these modes of being and understanding? These studies reveal, in various ways, how Israeli Jews work to link the lives of the newcomers with the Israeli nation-state by persuading them to partake in a shared vision of time
The second strand examines the ways in which young children in early education settings are presented with cultural models, and experiences of, organized social life. In this regard, I carried out an ethnography of an Israeli-Jewish kindergarten, an interview study with Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian early education teachers, and a study of children's literature. On the basis of this research, I have published a series of papers, each of which looks at a different aspect of the cultural, social and political knowledge deemed crucial, by educators, for young children to imbibe as part of the process of learning to belong
The third strand addresses the work undertaken by mothers in order to ensure what they perceive to be the proper education of their children. Among other publications, together with my colleagues Dr. Lauren Erdreich and Dr. Sveta Roberman, I have published a cross-cultural study of mothering and education: Mothering, Education and Culture: Russian, Palestinian and Jewish Middle-Class Mothers in Israeli Society,Palgrave Macmillan (2018)
