MATAN KAMINER Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan #6 Andrews St., Jaffa, Israel 6818127 ; mkaminer@umich.edu https://lsa.umich.edu/anthro/people/graduate-students/mkaminer.html EDUCATION 2012 - University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology PhD., expected 2019 Dissertation title: By the Sweat of Other Brows: Thai Migrant Labor and the Transformation of Israeli Settler Agriculture. Committee: Andrew Shryock (chair), Alaina Lemon, Jason De León, Daniel Nemser, Scott Stonington. Major Awards: Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Development Research Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award, Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Rackham Humanities Research Candidacy Fellowship. M.A., 2015 Awards: Thai Studies Grant, Center for Southeast Asian Studies (2014, 2015), Summer Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (2015), Academic Year Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (2014). Teaching: Introduction to Anthropology (2014), Graduate Student Instructor. 2007 11 Tel Aviv University M.A., Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Dean s Honors, 2011 Thesis Title: Zero-Grade Labor: Worker Subjectivity in an Industrial Warehouse. Adviser: Dan Rabinowitz. Research: Coordinator, Research Group on Questions of Justice Between Philosophy and Sociology, chairs Profs. Nissim Mizrahi and Yossi Dahan, Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem. Teaching: Introduction to Anthropology (2010), assistant to Prof. Haim Hazan; Qualitative Research Methods (2009, 2010), assistant to Prof. Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni. Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students Awards: Adi Lautman Memorial Stipend (2008-11). 1
PUBLICATIONS Refereed Journal Articles 2018 The Oksana Affair: Ambiguous Resistance in an Israeli Warehouse. Ethnography 19(1), pp. 25-43. 2016 Skill. Mafteakh: Lexical Review of Political Thought 10 (Spring), pp. 73-84 [Hebrew]. Non-Refereed Journal Articles 2016 A Lonely Songkran in the Arabah. Middle East Report 279 (Summer), pp. 34-37 [German trans. 8 March]. 2015 A surplus of disaster: Review of Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith by Vincanne Adams, Anthropological Quarterly 88, no. 1 (Winter), pp. 227-35. Book Chapters 2018 Connections Yet Unmade: The Reception of Balibar and Wallerstein s Race, Nation, Class in Israel. In Race, Nation, Class : Rereading a Dialogue for Our Times, ed. Manuela Bojadzijev, Katrin Klingan. Berlin: Argument-Verlag, pp. 170-77. Works in progress Pioneers for Hire: Transnational settler colonialism and the migrant flow from Thailand to Israel. This article will analyze two origins of the migration stream: an attempt by the Moshavim Movement, an organization explicitly devoted to the national goal of settlement, to resolve the crisis of Israeli agriculture in the 1980 s by importing cheap labor, and the Thai military establishment s interest in agricultural settlement as a means of controlling territory. I will contrast and integrate Patrick Wolfe s ideal-type model of settler colonialism with Ann Stoler s family-resemblance approach to the colony. At the zero degree / Below the minimum: Differentiated labor-powers in the Israeli labor market. This article will compare findings from my two ethnographic projects to argue that in Israel, racial and ethnic categories do not only structure the job market but are also turn structured thereby, producing differentiated human types perceived as fit for particular jobs and corresponding wage levels. One such type is what I call the zero-degree Israeli citizen worker, entitled to the minimum wage for unskilled work; another is the tailandi, paid about 70% of that minimum and constituted legally and culturally as only fit for a specific line of work. 2
Selected Other Publications 2017 A hollow democracy. Jacobin, 29 April. 2015 A long way from home: Isaan villagers experience of farmwork in Israel. Isaan Record, 15 October. 2014 with Noa Shauer, Below the minimum: Non-enforcement of wage law as a structural element in the agricultural sector in Israel. Kav La oved (Workers Hotline), June [English trans. January 2015]. 2013 Heading off the new Jerusalem. Jacobin, 23 January. 2011 On the current conjuncture in Israel. Jadaliyya, 15 Aug. 2010 with Maya Shapiro, "Bubbling over: The contestation of urban space and possibilities for joint struggle in Tel Aviv. In "Cities in turmoil, special issue of Re-Public, ed. Gia Galati and Konstantin Kastrissianakis. October. 2007 "People's History Here and Now An interview with Howard Zinn, in A People's History of the United States. Tel Aviv: Babel [Hebrew]. MAJOR AWARDS 2018 Rackham Humanities Research Candidacy Fellowship, University of Michigan ($20,400). 2017 Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Development Research Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award ($31,632). 2016 Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship ($19,500). INVITED TALKS 2017 Settlement, racialization and social reproduction. Borders and Sovereignty Cluster, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. 27 December. CONFERENCE AND WORKSHOP PARTICIPATION Workshops Organized 2017 Colloquium for Researchers of Thai Migration in Israel. Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, Tel Aviv, August 31. Conferences Organized 2012 with Efrayim Davidi. Sixth Annual Marx Conference. Tel Aviv, 1-2 June. 3
Panels Organized 2017 with Guy Shalev. Neutrality in a Polarized Space. Annual Meeting of the Israeli Anthropological Association, Kufr Qasem, May 17-18. 2016 Migrants in Border Zones. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Minneapolis, November 20-24. Selected Papers Presented 2018 From A light unto the nations to the land of the white man : Global migration and recent shifts in the racialization of migrants in Israel. Research and Orientation Workshop in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Kolkata, 25-30 November. 2018 The citizen and the tailandi: Racializing labour power in Israel." Historical Materialism Conference, London, 8-11 November. 2018 The production of differ rential labor-powers: Accounting for racialization with Marx. Annual Meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, Stockholm, 14-17 August. 2017 The ethical neutralization of agricultural work in the Israeli Arabah. Workshop on Moral Economies: Work, Values and Economic Ethics, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Wittenberg, Germany, 6-9 December. 2017 Transnational settler colonialism: The case of Thai labor migration to Israel. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington DC, November 29 December 3. 2017 Who Holds the Plow? Thai Migrants and the Neutralization of Farmwork in the Moshavim of the Arabah. Annual Meeting of the Israeli Anthropological Association, Kufr Qasem, May 17-18. 2016 The Production of a Neutral Work Force: Employing Thai Migrants on Israel s Agrarian Frontier. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Minneapolis, November 20-24. 2014 Skill. Political Lexical Conference, Minerva Center for the Humanities, Tel Aviv University, May 7. 2014 No more Hebrew labor: The devaluation of agricultural work in Israel. Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, Albuquerque, March 20-22. 2013 A semiotic model of the social field. Michicagoan Graduate Conference for Linguistic Anthropology; Ann Arbor, May 11-12. 2013 with Eilat Maoz. The Politics of the Ethno-Nation and the Dynamic of Capital. Impasses of Critique Conference at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. September 1. 4
ADDITIONAL GRANTS, FELLOWSHIPS AND AFFILIATIONS 2018 Rackham Program in Public Scholarship, University of Michigan ($7,000). 2017 - Research Fellow, Institute for Immigration and Social Integration, Ruppin Academic Center. 2017-18 Coordinator, Migration and Demography Section, Israeli Sociological Association. 2016 Research Fellow, Dead Sea and Arava Research Center. 2016 Thai Studies Grant, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan ($2,000). 2016 Rackham Graduate Student Research Award, University of Michigan ($3,000). 2015 Thai Studies Grant, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan ($3,000). 2015 Summer Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in Thai, University of Michigan ($2,500). 2014 Rackham Graduate Student Research Award, University of Michigan ($1,500). 2014 Acad. Year Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in Thai, University of Michigan ($15,000). 2014 Thai Studies Grant, University of Michigan ($3,700). 2014 Department of Anthropology Summer Research Grant, University of Michigan ($2,000). 2013 Department of Anthropology Summer Research Grant, University of Michigan ($2,000). 2010 Dean's List Scholarship for Academic Excellence, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tel Aviv University. 2009-11 Adi Lautman Memorial Stipend, Tel Aviv University. OTHER PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Translator, 2005-13 As a translator from English and Spanish for some of Israel s most influential publishers, including Babel, Tolaat Sfarim, Andalus, HaKibbutz HaMeuhad, and Resling, I made an impact on the local intellectual scene with such titles as Steven Shapin s Scientific Revolution and Howard Zinn s A People s History of the United States, to which I also contributed an afterword and interview with the author. 5
Educator and writer on political economy, 2004 - Since my teen years I have been involved in writing and teaching about Marxian approaches to political economy, and have been called the foremost of the young generation of Marxists in Israel. I have written for a number of prestigious venues, given many talks, and led two reading groups of Marx s Capital, at the Left Bank Club (2010) and Beit Ha am (2012). In the winter of 2018 I led a lecture course on New Directions in Left Thought at the Anna Loulou Bar in Jaffa. Chair of the board, La Escuelita, 2011-12. La Escuelita is a grassroots community organization of Latin American migrants in Tel Aviv, which I joined as a volunteer in 2006. I worked as a lecture organizer and Hebrew teacher, and beginning in 2011 I led the process of registering the organization as a legal association, of procuring municipal funding and space, and of regularizing its finances. Secretary, Shomrei Mishpat Rabbis for Human Rights, 2005. EXTRACURRICULAR UNIVERSITY SERVICE 2014 Representative for Rackham Graduate School, Central Student Government at the University of Michigan. 2010 11 Chair of the Audit Committee, Student Union at Tel Aviv University. 2009 10 Representative, Student Union at Tel Aviv University. PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS Israeli Sociological Association: Member, Migration and Demography Section. American Anthropological Association: Member, Anthropology of Work Section. Israeli Anthropological Association: Member. LANGUAGES AND METHODS Native Hebrew and English; Fluent in Spanish; Advanced in Thai (Central and Isaan), Arabic (Standard and Levantine Colloquial), French. Software: Proficient in Excel and SPSS. 6