Dr. Nitzan Rimon-Zarfaty and Dr. Lea David, former doctoral students at BGU’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology have been awarded prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships from the European Union´s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (MSCA) of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program offer mobility grants for researchers at all stages including: doctoral, post-doctoral and highly experienced researchers to support training and career development. The comparative and prestigious fellowships are aimed at promoting and supporting worldwide international, intersectoral and interdisciplinary mobility that implements excellent research in all fields.
Dr. Rimon-Zarfaty is a sociologist specializing in the field of sociology of medicine and bioethics. Her research mainly deals with the social, cultural and ethical issues related to medical technologies at the beginning of life and related concepts of personhood, parenthood, responsibility and temporality.
She wrote her dissertation entitled: “The Influence of New Medical Technologies on Perceptions of the “Fetus” and “Parenthood” among Israeli Parents” under the supervision of Prof. Aviad E. Raz (BGU) and Prof. Yael Hashiloni-Dolev (The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo).
She is also a recipient of the Minerva-Stiftung post-doctoral Fellowship of the Max Planck society (funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research) and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine at the University Medical Center Gottingen, Germany, where she will also conduct and expand her new post-doctoral research, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Silke Schicktanz. Her new research project focuses on a comparative-cross sectional analysis (i.e. cross- cultural German-Israeli comparison as well as comparison between experts and users ordinary (lay) ethics) of time constructions in the context of the social practice of egg-freezing.
Dr. Lea David is a sociologist specializing in the fields of human rights, ideology, the memorialization process in society and its impact. Her dissertation titled “No-One's Memories and a Monument to No-One: The Process of Collective Memory Construction in Post-War Serbia" was written under the supervision of Professors Lev Grinberg and Jackie Feldman (BGU).
Dr. David will conduct her post-doctoral research under the supervision of Prof. Sinisa Malesevic, a world leading expert on the comparative-historical and theoretical study of ethnicity, nationalism, ideology, war, violence and sociological theory and author of six books, five edited volumes and over 70 peer-reviewed articles. She will be hosted by the School of Sociology, at University College Dublin (UCD), the largest and the best department for sociological research in Ireland where Prof. Malesevic is a Full Professor.
Dr. David will investigate the ways in which the human rights understanding of memorialization processes advocates, understands, promotes and mandates supposedly universal memorialization standards, asking whether in so doing it weakens or by contrast, often strengthens ethnic nationalism. Five case studies will be comparatively analyzed: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Israel and Palestine. Her research will provide a new perspective on the impact that mandating human rights memorialization standards has on the perception of the “self” and “other” and nationalist ideologies.
