• Bureacracy
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Hi I'm Yael Berda, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a fellow at the Middle East Initiative at the Kennedy school of government at Harvard University. This Year, I was Visiting Professor at the Ecole Haute de Science Social in Paris.    During  2019-2020, I was  Gerard Weinstock visiting lecturer in Sociology at Harvard University.
I teach courses on the intersections of sociology of law, race, bureaucracy and the state, within a colonial and imperial context.  I am most interested by the way bureacratic practices, the daily and mundane kind, shape political outcomes. 

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Podcasts

"Colonialism"

Prof. On Barak of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University discusses his book, Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization. He takes on a historical journey to think of energy in the historical context of the making of the Middle East as a region, during the long 19th century. Instead of thinking that we are in a transition from coal to oil to cleaner energies, he argues, we need to understand the persistence of coal in the Middle East and how our reliance on it has shaped our politics, economics and culture.

Night Comes On: Ottoman Cities After Dark

Avner Wishnitzer, professor of Ottoman history at Tel Aviv University, discusses his book As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities After Dark, a groundbreaking social history of Istanbul and Jerusalem on the cusp of modernity.

Multi-Layered Palestinian Presence

Dr Andreas Hackl, anthropologist at the University of Edinburgh, discusses his new book, The Invisible Palestinians: The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv.

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