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Dr Matan Kaminer

Matan

Lecturer in Business and Society

Email: m.kaminer@qmul.ac.uk

Profile

Roles:

Biography:

Matan is Lecturer in Business and Society and joined Queen Mary in 2024. His background is in cultural anthropology, political economy, and political ecology. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and an MA in Sociology and Anthropology from Tel Aviv University.

A long-time activist, he has participated in movements against militarism and occupation, in solidarity with migrant workers, and for the democratisation of academic life. His research on agricultural labour migration from South and Southeast Asia to the Middle East encompasses geo-political and geo-economic processes from the perspective of the most marginalised.  Matan’s research interests include (but are not limited to!) the political ecology of desert agriculture, the racialisation of agrarian labour, and labour migration in the Indian Ocean world.

His most recent interests span the history of proletarianisation in Palestine/Israel and elsewhere and the synergy between exploitation and elimination of the indigenous in colonial contexts. His book, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

Teaching

Postgraduate:

  • Global Supply Chain Management (BUSM091)

Research

Research Interests:

Matan’s interests centre on the anthropology of agricultural labour, especially in relation to questions of racialisation, coloniality and political ecology. His most recent and current research focuses on:

  • The political ecology of desert agriculture,
  • agrarian labour processes and racialisation, and
  • labour migration in the Indian Ocean world.

Publications

Journal articles

  • Matan Kaminer forthcoming, Transnational Coloniality: The Thai Military’s ‘Frontier Settlement’ Project and the Beginnings of the Migration Flow from Thailand to Israel. Israel [Hebrew].
  • Yahel Kurlander, Shahar Shoham, and Matan Kaminer 2024, Crucial Yet Disavowed: Thai Migrant Farmworkers and Israel’s Migration Regime. Geography Research Forum 43, pp. 1-24.
  • Matan Kaminer 2023, Towards a Political Ecology of Zionism in the Rural Sphere. Theory and Criticism 57, pp. 71-99 [Hebrew].
  • Matan Kaminer 2023, The Abrahamic Ideology: Patrilineal Kinship and the Politics of Peacemaking in the Contemporary Middle East. Millennium, published online November 20, 2023.
  • Matan Kaminer 2022, Saving the Face of the Arabah: Thai Migrant workers and the Asymmetries of Community in an Israeli Agricultural Settlement. American Ethnologist 49(1), pp. 118-131.
  • Matan Kaminer 2022, The Agricultural Settlement of the Arabah and the Political Ecology of Zionism. International Journal of Middle East Studies 54(1), pp. 40-56.
  • Matan Kaminer 2022, Review of Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village by Holly High. Journal of Contemporary Asia 52(4), pp. 684–686.
  • Yahel Kurlander and Matan Kaminer 2020, Permanent Workers in the Back Yard: Employing Thai Agricultural Labor Migrants in the Israeli Countryside. Horizons in Geography 98, pp. 131-148 [Hebrew].
  • Matan Kaminer 2019, At the Zero Degree / Below the Minimum: Wage as Sign in Israel’s Split Labor Market. Dialectical Anthropology 43(3), pp. 317-332.
  • Matan Kaminer 2019, Speculating on Climate Change in the UAE: Review of Spaceship in the Desert by Gökçe Günel. Middle East Report, 12 April.
  • Matan Kaminer 2018, The Oksana Affair: Ambiguous Resistance in an Israeli Warehouse. Ethnography 19(1), pp. 25-43.
  • Matan Kaminer 2016, Skill. Mafteakh: Lexical Review of Political Thought 10 (Spring), pp. 73-84 [Hebrew].
  • Matan Kaminer 2015, A Surplus of Disaster: Review of Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith by Vincanne Adams, Anthropological Quarterly 88, no. 1 (Winter), pp. 227-35.

 

Books

  • Matan Kaminer forthcoming, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture. Stanford University Press.
  • Matan Kaminer, Smadar Nehab, Carmel Kaminer, Joel Beinin, Arieh Dayan, Meir Amor, Anat Matar and Odeh Bisharat (eds.) 2019, The Independent Left in Israel, 1967-1993: Essays in Memory of Noam Kaminer Tel Aviv: November Books [Hebrew].

Book chapters 

  • Matan Kaminer and Joel Beinin 2019, Introduction: The Independent Left in Israel, 1967-1993. In Matan Kaminer, Smadar Nehab, Carmel Kaminer, Joel Beinin, Arieh Dayan, Meir Amor, Anat Matar and Odeh Bisharat (eds.) 2019, The Independent Left in Israel, 1967-1993: Essays in Memory of Noam Kaminer Tel Aviv: November Books [Hebrew].
  • Matan Kaminer 2018, Connections Yet Unmade: The Reception of Balibar and Wallerstein’s Race, Nation, Class in Israel. In “Race, Nation, Class”: Rereading a Dialogue for Our Times, ed. Manuela Bojadzijev, Katrin Klingan. Berlin: Argument-Verlag, pp. 170-77.

 

Selected other publications

  • Matan Kaminer 2023, The Rebirth of the ‘Natural Worker’: Racialization and Class Formation in Zionist Agriculture. New Socialist, September 30.
  • Matan Kaminer 2022, Marxist Anthropology in a World of Surplus Population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value Workshop. Focaal Blog, January 22.
  • Matan Kaminer 2020, Jihad, Universalism and the Left: A Conversation with Darryl Li. Allegra Lab and LeftEast (extended version), 18 December.
  • Matan Kaminer 2020, In the Shadow of the Mountains: The Jordan Valley and Israel/Palestine’s Marginalized East. Jadaliyya, 9 September.
  • Matan Kaminer 2020, Giving Them the Slip: Israeli Employers’ Strategic Falsification of Pay Slips to Disguise the Violation of Thai Farmworkers’ Right to the Minimum Wage. Journal of Legal Anthropology 3(2), pp. 124-127.
  • Matan Kaminer 2019, Averted Gazes in the Arabah. Hazman Hazeh (reprinted in Ha’aretz), 23 October [Hebrew].
  • Matan Kaminer 2019, Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture: A Neoliberal Solution to a Colonial Problem. Israeli Affairs 74, pp. 65-74 [Arabic].
  • Matan Kaminer 2016, A Lonely Songkran in the Arabah. Middle East Report 279 (Summer), pp. 34-37.
  • Noa Shauer and Matan Kaminer 2014, Below the Minimum: Non-Enforcement of Wage Law as a Structural Element in the Agricultural Sector in Israel. Kav La’oved (Workers Hotline), June [English trans. January 2015].
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