Tamar Hager

Tel-Hai Academic College | telhai · Department of Education and the gender studies program

For female Arab student citizens of Israel, Israeli academia can become a violently unsafe site that reflects its racist reality. Our article addresses stories told by two Arab-Palestinian female students about sexual misconduct they experienced from Jewish males. Reading these stories through critical race theory, intersectionality and settler col...

This article explores theoretical concepts that reveal the power structures within Israeli academia. Rather than employing the conventional framework that emphasizes practices of discrimination and underrepresentation to explain the ongoing preference for the dominant Western, white Jewish group and its cultural capital over Jewish and Arab Palesti...

This article focuses on Aliza Levenberg, an educator who taught at a Kiryat Shmona high school at the beginning of the 1960s. For three years Levenberg, a middle class Western European, travelled every week from her home in Tel Aviv to the poor town in the northern periphery of Israel, the inhabitants of which were mainly immigrants from Islamic co...

Ample literature exists on the impact of prevention programmes on their target audience, while much less is known about how delivering such programmes influences their facilitators. Even less literature exists on the emotional and social processes that form this potential impact on facilitators. The current study analysed qualitative in-depth, non-...

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of COVID-19′s impact on the development, delivery, and uptake of “Favoring Myself”, a school-based interactive wellness program conducted via Zoom during 2020–2021. “Favoring Myself” targets resilience, self-esteem, body-esteem, self-care behaviors, and media literacy among 5th-grade preadolescents. Data w...

This article demonstrates how stories serve as effective methodology when scrutinizing the meaning of social and political conflicts in diverse classrooms. I base my argument on a story about a distressing conflict among students from different ethnic, and national backgrounds occurring in an academic course at an Israeli college. A detailed descri...

The original version of the book was originally published in 2021 with exclusive rights reserved by the Publisher. As of 2022 it has been changed to an open access publication: © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s).

Among those who died in the battle at Tel Hai were two young women, Dvora Drachler and Sarah Chizik. Although they were the first women to be killed in a Yishuv battle, and were treated with honor immediately after their death, their commemoration as female warriors were never established, and their public memory was faded. This article explores th...

This article addresses the complexities confronted when researching and writing the life story of Mary Ryan (1848–1914), the sitter for the photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. Ryan, a beggar in childhood, became Cameron’s maid, model and assistant, and eventually, following their marriage, was transformed into a British lady. Her apparent Cindere...

In this article, we share our personal stories across borders to demonstrate the harm neoliberal governmentalities, in higher education institutions in the UK and Israel, have inflicted on us in our daily teaching routine. Following Sara Ahmed's statement that “[f]eminism as a collective movement is made out of how we are moved to become feminists...

Our personal stories demonstrate the hazards of neoliberal governmentality. Substituting the essence of academic activity—teaching and knowledge production—with bureaucratic measurements, apparently for the sake of productivity and objectivity, diminishes the value of academic work. As the chapter shows, the oppressive regime of the audit culture,...

In neoliberal academia, where students are clients and teachers are service providers, tackling diversity and social controversies becomes a risk. In the first scene Susan recounts her concerns and frustrations when obtaining low scores in teaching assessment after conducting a course addressing the atrocities committed against Aboriginal Australia...

This chapter outlines our collaborative research and writing project which recounts personal stories regarding everyday survival in the neoliberal academia. It begins by depicting the characteristics of academic neoliberal regime, such as authoritarian managerialism, accountability processes, standardization measures, performance indicators and ben...

In this chapter the authors reveal the complex landscape of access to knowledge within the context of the neoliberal demand for productivity. In the first story, Susan reveals her personal epiphany about the restrictions on access to research knowledge due to publishing paywalls. Next, Omri tells about the devaluation of local knowledge that must b...

This chapter addresses the construction and management of an appropriate academic CV. Tamar begins by describing the barriers, hurdles, timelines, narrow calculations and self-constructions needed in negotiating the university promotions process. Next, Omri describes his somewhat unsuccessful efforts to expand graduate students’ understandings of h...

This chapter describes an Israeli author’s writing experience of Julia Margaret Cameron’s biography. Scrutinising existing archival material on the notable Victorian photographer, she tries understanding the roots of her artistic cravings. Interweaving her journey in the footsteps of Cameron with existing archival knowledge, she reveals—regardless...

This article scrutinizes stories produced, distributed, and circulated outside the literary field to reexamine the nature of literature as sets of cultural activities in specific periods and locations. It argues that these texts which poetically and aesthetically resemble literary artifacts yet do not perform in the cultural matrix as such actually...

Complex changes have buffeted the discipline of literature during the past decades, calling on us to rethink its academic and cultural definitions, boundaries, and territories. Texts which until recently have not been examined within literary studies (such as films, online texts, and visual artifacts) have “invaded” the disciplinary borders, while...

The neoliberalisation of higher education is gathering pace and momentum on a global scale, albeit with national differences. In this context, a number of challenges and conflicting politics are emerging especially in relation to pedagogical ethos of social justice. Our article analyzes the general characteristics of neoliberal policy and practices...

My article narrates and theorizes one educational moment of speaking ‘across’ the social and political margins in a peripheral college on the northern border of Israel. I recognize the academic space as what historian Louise Pratt titled a ‘contact zone’ where peoples geographically and historically separated meet within radically asymmetrical rela...

This article suggests a feminist reading of the photograph ‘Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty’ created by the early Victorian photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. Examining this photograph in its historical context, it analyzes the unique encounter between Cameron, an upper-middle-class Anglo-Indian photographer, and her female model-subject, who came...

Although infanticide was a capital crime, mothers who killed their children were seldom convicted of murder and, from 1849 onward, hardly ever faced the death penalty. In fact, between 1843—when the authorities began documenting the gender of offenders—and 1899, only five women were hanged for infanticide. This article follows the story of one of t...

The Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel, one-fifth of the country's population, has been underrepresented in Israeli institutions of higher education since the establishment of the state. This article focuses on the authors’ shared aim of promoting diversity and multiculturalism in institutions of higher education in Israel. It first introduces Ara...

How can I use my writing to tackle my conflicting experiences as a writer, a mother, a feminist activist in Israeli academia? How can words combine the routine exhausting work and pleasures of motherhood; my struggles against injustice done to the Arab minority in my country, torn by unrelenting conflict; and the need to turn my back on all these o...

This paper addresses my political and pedagogical resistance to the institutional discrimination of Palestinian Arab students in Israeli academia. Describing my instinctive negative reactions (frustration, helplessness, anger) towards what seems at first sight as their reluctance to study, I go on to criticize my own and other lecturers' tendency t...

The persistent Jewish Arab conflict is present in every aspect of life in Israeli society and its echoes penetrate the everyday reality of higher educational institutions. Feelings of mutual hostility among Arab and Jewish students, faculty and administration are common experiences on Israeli campuses. This article analyzes two textual expressions...

The modern horror film genre has incessantly dealt with questions of parenthood, pregnancy and the status of mothers, particularly with “bad mothers.”From the heart of popular culture, horror films engage in these issues unexpectedly, and sometimes even radically. These films enable us to recognize cultural taboos and to expose secrets that are not...

This paper addresses a group of novels on nuclear war written especially for young readers in the US and the UK throughout the 1980s. Investigating the cultural role given to these texts, the paper goes on to scrutinize how they represented contemporary images of nuclear weaponry and war. The paper suggests that nuclear fictions for youth were invo...

This article introduces a pedagogical tool for raising critical consciousness and nurturing resistance to discrimination. ‘Autoethnographic mapping,’ integrating guided cognitive mapping and autoethnographies, has been implemented for a decade now within the framework of a college course occasioning dialogue between Palestinian Arab and Jewish stud...

This paper addresses a group of novels on nuclear war written especially for adolescents which were published in the United States throughout the 1980s. Investigating the political, social and literary shifts, which eventuated in turning nuclear war into a proper subject for young people, the paper goes on to scrutinize how nuclear weaponry and war...

This paper introduces a new methodology for measuring multicultural levels/intensity based on a study on attitudes towards multiculturalism conducted among college students in Israel. We developed an innovative methodological tool, “multicultural intensity,” that is composed of 8 different scales: the presence of two nationalities and cultures in t...

What led Ellen Harper and Selina Wadge to murder their children? Does Noa, the Tel Aviv historian, have the ability to understand them? And what are the chances that the narrator, who is and is not the author, will be a good mother to her twins, as her journey following Ellen, Selina and Noa becomes more and more demanding and begins to unsettle he...

The Israeli higher education institutions are the first (and usually the last) locations where both Jews and Arabs meet. This encounter takes place under the pressure of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which impacts the inter-cultural relations of Jewish and Arab students on campus. The proposed article explores what the significance of the intercultura...

This paper introduces a Jewish Arab dialogue model of national encounters which has been developed at Tel Hai College in Upper Galilee in Israel. These planned encounters, which have taken place for eight consecutive years within the framework of a course entitled ‘A Jewish–Arab dialogue – action research’ are recognized as part of the bachelor deg...

This article critically explores the modern myth of motherhood through my personal life story as a mother. Feelings of rejection of the demands and expectations of my motherly role led me to research social histories and feminist analyses for common maternal images. My explorations made me believe that the myth of motherhood is a relatively new soc...

This article will present a compound tool for raising consciousness and nurturing resistance, comprising both cognitive maps and autoethnographies. Termed “autoethnographic mapping” by the authors, this tool has been highly effective in work with a dialogue group of Palestinian and Jewish students in Israel. It has played a central role in uncoveri...

This article recounts an attempt by administration and faculty to create a multinational and multicultural vision for Tel Hai Academic College in the Galilee in Israel. This uncommon initiative in the Israeli academia intends to transform the campus into a unique academic institution allowing equality and visibility for all cultural and national mi...

This article reconstructs the evasive tales of two lower-class rural English mothers, Ellen Harper and Selina Wadge, who killed their offspring in the 1870s. Investigating depositions, other legal documents prepared for their trials, and reports of inquests and trial proceedings (when existent) in local and national newspapers, it interprets incohe...

Introduction - Northern Ireland, border country, Eamonn Hughes Northern Ireland - a place apart?, George Boyce "Why can't you get along with each other" - culture, structure and the Northern Ireland conflict, Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd Cuchullian and an RPO-7 - the ideology and politics of the Ulster Defence Association, James W McAuley the Lab...

Dewey focuses on seven novels that touch the variety of generic experiments and postures of the post-World War 11 American novel. These novels by Vonnegut, Coover, Percy, Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo represent a significant argument concerning the American literary response to living within the oppressive technologies of the Nuclear Age. Departing...

Science fiction and conflict, Philip John Davies where no man has gone before - sexual politics and science fiction, Jacqueline Pearson yellow, black or tentacled - the race question in American science fiction, Edward James the "personal" versus the "political" in Utopian SF, Anthony Easthope Kozmick Kommie Konflicts - Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" -...