Date:
Location:
"The File and the Checkpoint: Managing Citizenship in Israel and India after Independence"
Speaker:
Yael Berda, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University.
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.
Contact:
Shana Rabinowich
shana_rabinowich@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Abstract:
Berda explores regime change, the transition from colonial rule to independence, from a perspective rarely studied: the daily and mundane bureaucratic practices and internal administrative negotiation reflected in administrative minutes, statistical tables and maps for classifying populations. Drawing upon previously unexplored files from ministries of interior, the concentrated effort on legacies of organizational routines, which I call administrative memory, contributes new insights into the making of discriminatory practices of exclusion against minorities employed by democratic states, usually justified by a set of particular political, national or religious conflicts that are said to necessitate these practices.
Emergency laws in the colonies gave powers to officers to use extreme measures, but never specified against which populations these tools were to be used. In order to turn the emergency laws into administrative practice, population was categorized on two axes: demographic traits and administrative relationship to the state, namely, patriot, suspect, security threat or enemy-of-the state. In turn, these colonial classifications based on suspicion, determined the access minorities had to identity documents, freedom of movement and eventually, political membership and rights in the independent states.
Bio:
Dr. Yael Berda is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University. She received her PhD from Princeton University; MA from Tel Aviv University and LLB from Hebrew University faculty of Law. Berda was a practicing defense lawyer, representing in military, district and Supreme courts in Israel. Her first book" the Bureaucracy of the Occupation: the permit regime in the West Bank" (Hebrew) 2012 is the first study to explore the organizational and administrative aspects of the Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. (English version forthcoming in 2016).
In 2014-2015 (and in 2016-2017) Berda was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for international and regional studies. She is currently working on a book entitled: Colonial Legacy and Administrative Memory – the legal construction of Citizenship in Israel India and Cyprus.
Berda teaches courses on sociology of law, political sociology, bureaucracy and the state and sociology of empires. She writes about the relationship between race, law and bureaucracy, particularly the legacies of colonial bureaucracy and emergency laws. She is very interested in the structural effect that race has on state organizations, through practices, routines and documents.
