Lecture by Sarah S. Willen about her award-winning book
Fighting For Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins
Sunday, January 31st | Register here
Sarah S. Willen will reflect on her long-term ethnographic engagement with global migrants who came to Israel from countries as varied as Ghana and the Philippines, Nigeria, Colombia, and Ukraine seeking work opportunities. After a brief heyday around the year 2000, many of these migrant communities fell apart when the Israeli government launched a mass deportation campaign (2002-05) that set the stage for even more aggressive anti-migrant and anti-refugee policies in the years to come. Drawing on fieldwork in homes and in churches, medical offices, human rights NGOs, and public spaces, Willen explores how global migrants in Tel Aviv struggle to craft meaningful, flourishing lives despite the exclusions and vulnerabilities they endure.
Sarah S. Willen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, where she also directs the Research Program on Global Health & Human Rights at the Human Rights Institute. Her first book, Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), was awarded the 2019 Yonathan Shapiro Prize for Best Book in Israel Studies from the Association for Israel Studies, the 2020 Edie Turner First Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, and was named finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore from the Association for Jewish Studies.