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Shahar Shoham
Dr. Shahar Shoham
ChainGE Lab Research Fellow
Dr. Shahar Shoham is an anthropologist specializing in labor migration at the intersection of policy, lived experience, and migrant-centred research. Her doctoral research at Humboldt University's Institute for Asian and African Studies examined the Thailand-Israel migration regime, analyzing the regime's multi-scalar structures.
Dr. Shoham is an engaged scholar with two decades of experience in advocacy work in academia and beyond. She previously directed the migrants and refugees department at Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and researched Israel's externalization policies toward refugees. Currently, Dr. Shoham is developing a multimodal visual anthropology project that builds on her doctoral research. This innovative work explores sending communities' significance for research and political action, returning migrants' lived experiences, and their evolving imaginaries of possible futures and change.
Pickers and Packer
The multimodal ethnography project engages with the multiple generations' experiences of the people from Ban Phak Khad, a village in the northeast region of Thailand, known as Isaan, and their lived experiences while living in Israel as migrant workers during different periods in the last four decades. By analyzing the workers’ experiences, emotions, creative productions and actions while in Israel and upon return home, the project highlights how the migrants operate on a spectrum of acts of resistance towards the regime and its multiscalar disciplinary power. The project follows a multimodal anthropology and feminist methodology vision, aiming to move beyond the written text by engaging with multi-sensory modes of knowledge production, the dissemination of academic research and aims to develop translocal practices to support workers' struggles for better futures.