Department of Politics and International Studies
Teaching Fellow
London Middle East Institute (LMEI)
Member
Centre for Palestine Studies (CPS)
Member
- Name:
- Dr Moriel Ram
- Email address:
- mr45:soas.ac.uk
- Address:
- SOAS University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG - Building:
- Russell Square: College Buildings
- Office No:
- 221
- Office Hours:
- Tuesdays 10am - 11am
Biography
Moriel Ram's research interests lie at the intersection between militaristic geographies of death, urban geopolitics of faith and medical spatialities of health.
His past and current research has focused on normalisation process of contested territories by comparing the Golan Heights and Northern Cyprus; contested urban environments and religious communal identity in Israel's mixed cities and representation of undead spaces in popular geopolitical discourses.
Moriel holds a PhD in politics and governance from Ben Gurion University, Israel and a post doc in the Department of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion-Israel's Technological Institute.
PhD Research
My recent project examines how Israel narrates its geopolitical image through the planning, construction and operation of medical facilities, such as hospitals, clinics and relief centres in Africa in order to provide a better understanding of the ways in which foreign policy, international trade and the global economy are used by nations in order to construct a geopolitical imagination of themselves. The research is based on a historiographic and geographic analysis (mainly archival research, cartographic outline and in-depth interviews) of Israeli involvement in the construction of medical facilities in African states. I intend to place my empirical work within a theoretical framework that examines how Israel's medical involvement in these African countries constantly produces a convoluted set of moral geographies. That is, a set of silent ethical assertions that pre-organise explicit ethico-political discourses which work together to mark not only states, but also regions, cultural groupings and ethnic or racial territories. The project engages with the material practices, actual spaces and real politics that have increasingly incorporated recent and earlier studies of colonial geographies. By doing so my project analyse how the ideas, perceptions and beliefs embedded in the formation of Israel's medical and moral geographies in African countries have imagined a set of geo-cultural assumptions about "Africa", which became a valuable source of reinforcement for Israel's self-image as "Western".
Publications
Forthcoming, Moriel Ram and Meirav Aharon Gutman, "Sanctified strongholds: urban synagogues and the politics of change in contested urban environment'" submitted to Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie.
2016, Neve Gordon and Moriel Ram, "Ethnic Cleansing and the Formation of Settler Colonial Geographies," Political Geography 53: 20-29 (equal contribution).
2015, Moriel Ram, "Colonial Conquests Encampments and the Politics of Normalization: The Case of the Golan Heights and Northern Cyprus," Political Geography, 45 (7): 21-31.
2014, Moriel Ram, "White But not Quite: Normalizing Colonial Conquests through Spatial Mimicry," Antipode 46 (3): 736-753.