Dr. Gazit is a faculty member (assistant professor) in the Glocal Program in International Development and in the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Trained in both international relations and sociology, she applies these tools to study the fields of international migration and refugees, space and borders, security and emotions.
Before joining the faculty of the Hebrew University in 2019, she completed her Ph.D. in both the Department of International Relations and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University, as well as an LL.B in the Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law. She continued to UCLA as a Rothschild (Yad Hanadiv) post-doctoral fellow in UCLA’s International Institute and Department of Sociology, and then joined the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MBSF) at the Hebrew University, where she pursued a research project on the interrelations between migration, border crossing and emotions through classical social thought (published in International Studies Review, International Theory and the Journal of Classical Sociology).
She has also studied host states’ changing reactions to massive migration inflows focusing on the German societal response to the 2015 “refugee crisis”; analyzed the branching-out of the practice of citizenship tests for immigrants in Western countries (with Oded Lowenheim); and conducted in-depth extensive studies of various immigrant communities, including Latin American political exiles who fled to Israel following their political persecution in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil in the 1970s, Ethiopian immigrants in Israel (with Gad Yair), and the Lebanese forced migrants (Tzadal) who fled from South Lebanon to Israel in the year 2000.
Her further fields of research include international political sociology (IPS); border areas and border cultures in IR; nonstate actors (such as militias and diasporas) in intrastate and interstate conflicts; space and spatiality in world politics; the sociology of Israeli society—with a particular interest in ethnic minorities and diasporic communities in Israel; the sociology of boundaries, borders and space; globalization and citizenship; communities; civilizations; international relations theory; classical and contemporary social thought; and migration and emotions.
Her most recent research project focuses on the experience of (mis)trust—particularly in the context of protracted conflict, trauma, and forced migration. Another recent research project addresses the everyday insecurity of border areas.
In Glocal she teaches the mandatory course in Community Development, which creates a common framework for the students to address this topic. The course introduces various approaches to community development applied to the Israeli and global contexts, includes guided tours and in-class discussions with experts in the field of community development, and evaluates these approaches from a comparative and critical sociological perspective. Another course she teaches in Glocal is Refugees & Development, which relies on a wide span of case studies from various national and cultural contexts to address such topics as the ways borders (and their diverse spatial expressions, such as refugee camps, airports, border zones, and city gates) shape and are shaped by patterns of global mobility; emotions, trauma and the social-psychological aspects of migration; and the roles development practitioners play in their work in refugee camps. The course also consists of a close acquaintance with the case of the African asylum seekers in Israel