Galia Plotkin Amrami

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev | bgu · Department of Education

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a rapidly globalizing medical category, and there is a need to attend to the on the-ground processes through which laypeople deploy the ADHD label in different local contexts. Based on in-depth interviews with Israeli mothers of children with ADHD, this article explores how mothers, as lay actors i...

Social research examining patients' and caretakers' narration of mental disorders, including ADHD, has been remarkably silent about comorbidity. Centering the theme of uncertainty and the question of what is "at stake" in mothers' mental health narratives of children (Kleinman, 1988), we characterize the patchwork process by which mothers deploy AD...

Matters of parenting transgender children are ascendant on the cultural landscape. Based on interviews with Israeli mothers of transgender children between the ages of 8–24 I explore how the process of the child's gender affirmation intersects with maternal subjectivities, and how mothers internalize the morally‐loaded narratives of good mothering...

Educational discourses have embraced therapeutic discourse, a psychology-based system of assumptions about the self, its boundaries, development and social relations. While scholars have debated the virtues of this therapeutic turn, there has been little empirical study of therapeutic discourse in teacher pedagogical discourse. This article, using...

This article explores the moral dimensions of the clinical narration of suffering in a highly political context. Based on an ethnographic analysis of psychotherapists’ discussions of a clinical case related to the Israeli evacuation from Gaza, I illustrate how the care providers navigate competing moral logics while explaining the reasons for the p...

This article explores how Israeli mental health practitioners emotionalised the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by intervening in the public sphere. Based on a close reading of texts produced by two Israeli civil society associations of psy-professionals – Imut and Natal – we analyse and compare two languages of emotion that they developed in response...

חוסן נפשי הוא היכולת להתאושש במהירות מחוויות קשות. בשני העשורים האחרונים, בעיקר בעקבות מתקפות הטרור שהתרחשו במערב מאז 11/9 וסדרה של אסונות טבע שהתחוללו בשנים שלאחר מכן, מושג החוסן החל לשמש גרעין לאמנה חברתית ניאו-ליברלית המבקשת לצמצם את אחריות המדינה להתמודדות עם אסונות עתידיים. לפי התפיסה החדשה, המדינה מעתיקה את נטל ההתמודדות הזו אל האזרחים ומסתפק...

Growing numbers of trauma survivors have chosen to cope with their ongoing invisible wounds through tattooing their bodies. This phenomenon includes individuals as well as organized and documented projects held in public spaces. The topic of body modification through tattoos has benefited from an explosion in academic interest; however, there has b...

A new educational paradigm, ‘resilience education,’ has emerged as an effort by states and local communities to provide their constituencies with skills to cope with natural and man-made disasters. While the topic of resilience has seen an explosion in academic and policy interest, little scholarly attention has been paid to exploring the social or...

This article explores the role of mental health knowledge in selecting candidates for a high school program for potential immigrant teenagers in contemporary Israel. Analyzing how professional knowledge is applied in the selection procedures subordinated to the national Law of Return, we examine the intrinsic links between the psychological profili...

The concept of cultural trauma serves as a useful analytical framework for analyzing social processes of the creation of trauma narratives. Following the conceptualization of “cultural trauma” by Jeffrey Alexander, this article focuses on representations of the “nature of pain” produced by mental health professionals who identified with Religious Z...

In the aftermath of 9/11, the concept of psychological resilience, which refers to the ability to “bounce back” after adversity, became prominent across the American mental health community. Resilience thinking made its way quickly into the U.S. military, where it sparked the most expensive psychological intervention program in history. This articl...

This article explores the mechanisms underlying the formation of a new category in the Israeli therapeutic field—“national trauma.” By comparing the two different paths of emergence of this category, the research reexamines the meaning of Hacking’s concept “looping effect” and, in particular, the issue of awareness of the categorized individuals an...

While the concept of resilience has attracted a great deal of academic interest, less attention has been paid to the particular traits of the resilient subject. This article extracts the prototype of the resilient student as performed through professional interventions that build resilience in Israeli schools in the context of the Israeli–Palestini...

The forced evacuation of Jewish Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank in August 2005 (known as the Disengagement) was an extremely controversial political event in Israeli public discourse. This article seeks to explore how political differences in the public sphere were reflected in the professional narratives of mental h...

This article offers an ethnographic account of the professional activities of mental health practitioners, employed by the state’s religious education system. I analyze various models implemented by practitioners for the purposes of preparing pupils for the state-mandated evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza and the West Bank. By focusing on the...

We sketch a variety of institutional, discursive, professional, and personal ‘vectors’, dating back to the 1980s, in order to explain how ‘national trauma’ was able to go from a cultural into a professional category in Israeli mental health during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000–2005). Our genealogy follows Ian Hacking’s approach to transient mental ill...

Over the last decade the use of term “national trauma” has become ubiquitous following the acts of mass terrorism perceived as threatening to destabilize collective identities of entire populations. It has been particularly relevant in the political context of both the post 9/11 US public discourse and the El-Aqsa Intifada-related Israeli public di...

The Israeli government's decision to evacuate Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank introduced a new category of at-risk individuals to Israeli mental health discourse, namely victims of what has come to be termed the "trauma of the Disengagement." This category refers to Jewish settlers who are motivated by a religious-Zionist ideo...

This article explores the increasing incorporation of professional-therapeutic knowledge and practices into the state-led apparatus of absorption of new immigrants in Israel. Singling out this phenomenon is the seemingly unexpected alliance between the therapeutic ethos, which leans on individualist, a-national and universal values, and state-led a...