Nira Yuval-Davis

Nira Yuval-Davis was born in Tel-Aviv to a Labour Zionist family.[3] She has one sister, Ora Sperber. Her parents, Itzhak and Rivka, migrated to Mandatory Palestine in the early 1930s. During WWII their families and community in Alytus, Lithuania, were murdered by the Nazis and their local helpers in the nearby woods. Nira Yuval-Davis grew up as part of a tight labour Zionist community in the heart of Tel-Aviv, during the 1950s.

As a student of sociology and psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Yuval-Davis started her political activism, against the military government of the Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as the ‘religious coercion’ and non-separation of religion and the state in Israel. During this period, she met her first husband, Uri Davis. After the 1967 Six-Day War, the activism of Yuval-Davis and others (her husband and close friends) focused primarily on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Her MA dissertation was an ethnographic study of the anti-Zionist Socialist Israeli organization Matzpen in 1977 in Hebrew. In 1979, Yuval-Davis joined her husband in a lecture tour in United States of America against the Israeli occupation. The tour was organized by the Jewish Peace Fellowship and brought Yuval-Davis in touch with different Jewish radical political movements which constituted part of the more general civil rights, anti-Vietnam and growing feminist movement in the USA at the time. These connections influenced Yuval-Davis's research orientation. She began to work on a PhD dissertation examining how different new Jewish movements in the USA in the period of 1967 to 73 constructed their Jewishness in relation to wider social issues.[4] After the birth of her son in 1973, Yuval-Davis moved to London. However, shortly after, for combined personal and political reasons, her first marriage ended. She transferred her PhD studies to University of Sussex, where she graduated in 1979.

Yuval-Davis continued her political activism while living in London. Shortly after arrival she joined a group of anti-Zionist socialist Israelis living in London who, a couple of years later, joined Palestinians and other Arab socialists to establish the journal and publication forum Khamsin.[5] She has continued to be active in this area. In 1984, as part of a combined academic and political tour in Australia, she met her second husband, Alain Hertzmann, who coordinated the local group JAZA (Jews against Zionism and Antisemitism). He moved to live with her in London a year later.

Yuval-Davis has been active in a range of local issues, mainly as part of feminist anti-racist forums such as WING (Women, Immigration and Nationality Group),[6][7] the European Socialist Feminist Group, Big Flame and from 1989, following the Salman Rushdie Affair, as a co-founder of Women Against Fundamentalism [8] which had by then transformed to the editorial collective of the online journal Feminist Dissent.[9] She was a founding member of the international research group on women in militarized conflict zones. In the 1990s, She became involved in the NGO Forums of the UN conferences on human rights, reproductive rights and women's rights, and worked as a consultant for Amnesty International, Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID), the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, and was part of an investigative women's delegation to the Gujarat after the pogroms against Muslims in 2003.[10][11][12]

In 2019, she joined the Labour Party and the Jewish Voice for Labour. and was a founder member of SSAHE (Social Scientists Against the Hostile Environment)

After part-time teaching as a student in Israel and the US, Yuval-Davis started working as a full-time lecturer in sociology in 1974 at Thames Polytechnic, which later became the University of Greenwich.[13] She resigned from University of Greenwich in 2003, in protest against the ‘restructuring’ that was taking place and moved on to the University of East London (UEL). After moving to UEL, she transferred Post-Graduate Gender and Ethnic Studies programmes to UEL, where she also found and co-directed the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB).[14] Her co-authored article on 'Everyday Bordering' won the 2019 Sage Sociology award for excellence and Innovation.[15]

She was elected as a fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences in 2003.[16] She was an appointed member of the 2008 RAE (UK national Research Assessment Exercise) and of the 2014 REF (UK national Research Excellence Framework) Sociology sub-panels. Among her major funded research projects Nira Yuval-Davis have been the 1994-7 ESRC research on Anti-Jewish & Anti-Arab Racialized Discourses in Britain and France; the 2004 Rockefeller fellowship on Human Security, Gender and Globalisation;[17] the 2005 – 2008 project on Identity, Performance and Social Action: The Use of Community Theatre Among Refugees, a major ESRC award as part of their research programme on Identities and Social Action; the 2012-2016 EU RF07 research programme on EUBorderscapes and the 2020 Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship on ‘Climate Change and the Politics of Belonging’.

• Bordering. John Wiley & Sons. 2019. ISBN 978-1-5095-0498-5.[18][19]
• Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity, edited with Sukhwant Dhaliwal, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2014[20][21][22][23][24][25]
• The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. SAGE. (2011) ISBN 978-1-4129-2130-5.[26][27][28][29]
• Gender and Nation. SAGE Publications. (1997).[30][31]
• Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Ethnicity, Race and Class, edited with D. Stasiulis, Sage, 1995[32]
• Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-racist Struggle. Routledge. 1992. ISBN 978-0-415-10388-6.[33]
• Woman-Nation-State. Palgrave Macmillan UK. 1989. ISBN 978-0-333-45803-7.[34][35][36]

Nira Yuval-Davis writings have been translated to more than ten languages.