Rom Michal

Bar Ilan University | BIU · Gender Studies Unit

This chapter describes the 5x2 Initiative, a collective impact initiative promoting excellence in STEM education in Israel, as a test case for collaborative governance. This Initiative was the first in Israel to implement the collective impact approach, which defines operating principles for systematic actions intended to solve complex social probl...

Women's inner struggle over their marital names reveal how they negotiate a specific identity location in each dimension of identity. This book tackles a complex sociological project of examining three existing theories, and will prove to be important for the study of Gender and Middle Eastern Culture.

Three recent Israeli books on local feminism describe how many among the natural constituency of Israeli feminism refuse to identify themselves with feminism or with the women’s movement. Erella Shadmi (2007) argues that the feminist idea, in general, and radical feminism, in particular, have not struck proper roots in Israeli society or among Isra...

Israeli women’s understanding of the historical process that enabled the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 has a significant effect on their identity formation. In the context of the local bloody battlefield, almost everybody in Israel has strong views concerning entitlements, rights, resolutions, and hopes. These views develop, among ot...

In this chapter, we turn our focus from the communities of practice within which women negotiate their identity and social value to the intimate sphere of couples’ relations. The discussion of the broad institutional context remains relevant for analyzing the constitution of women’s subjectivities, while power hierarchies embedded in the cultural l...

In her recent account of social relations in Israeli society, the feminist legal scholar, Orit Kamir, has contended that Israeli society is organized around the principle of respectability (Kamir, 2007). Respectability is seen as a person’s most important possession. Therefore, people have to protect it under all circumstances. Hebrew, continues Ka...

Typical storytelling in advanced capitalist societies involves individualistic and active ways of narrating life’s events as choices, decisions, capacities, compromises, and personality. As identified by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002), people are no longer willing to think of their lives as prescribed by alien forces outside their control. “Living...

The field of naming practices, and particularly those which evolve in an ambivalent context characterized by contradicting and conflicting forces, provides an opportunity to disentangle the complexity of the concepts “identity,” “becoming,” “belonging,” and last but not least the experience of “choice.” We discovered evidence of all these in our da...

Feminist sociolinguists have rejected the dichotomy between “powerful” and “powerless” speech since long, showing how cooperation, adaptation, and resistance coexist (Clair, 1998). In processes of self-projection as well as in nurturing relationships, women find ways to signify hegemonic language as their own, while creatively negotiating new, some...