On-Going Projects
Equitable resilience to heat: Modeling the consequences of community coordination and heat policy in two coastal cities (BSF grant 2023-2026, with Asaf Levanon, Maya Negev, and Moira Zellner)
Climate change will have a significant impact on life in cities as it exacerbates the Urban Heat Island effect. Various adaptation policies and strategies aim to reduce heat exposure among urban dwellers, but little attention has been given to the role of cooperation between agents and across scales, and to the distribution of risk and the impact on underprivileged households. New planning approaches are needed for equitable urban adaptation that are attentive to the distribution of benefits and dynamic risks, and places community at the center. Such approaches need to be grounded on proper empirical and modeling evidence. Addressing these challenges, we aim to identify the characteristics, attitudes and motivations that shape individual heat exposure and adaptation behavior, and the role of agent-agent, agent-environment and agent-policy interactions in producing impactful coordinated behavior that promotes equity across scales. We utilize a mixed-methods study design, combining quantitative survey data with qualitative interviews and walking tours, to inform agent-based modeling that represent this dynamical complex system, from the household to community to city level. We focus on the role of social norms and policies in influencing community resilience and distribution of vulnerabilities in a comparative design including two socially diverse contexts, the coastal cities of Haifa, Israel and Boston, the US. Our study models the impact and impact distribution of infrastructural and policy approaches to heat exposure, and how particulars of implementation and interactions among agents, between agents and their environment, and between agents and policy might influence outcomes. This comparative study will enable generalization of the understanding of unintended consequences on resilience and equity.
European Inventory of Societal Values of Culture as a Basis for Inclusive Cultural Policies in the Globalizing World (INVENT) (Horizon 2020 grant 2020-2023) https://inventculture.eu/
The New EU Agenda for Culture (2018) represents an exceptionally significant step forward in European cultural policy. However, this new focus of the EU on the sphere of culture is accompanied by theoretical and methodological challenges, which should be considered in the process of realizing the presented goals. The changes which Europe and the world have undergone over the last thirty years are so drastic that they require a different approach to creating cultural policy. Our intention is to study how the way of life and cultural participation of European citizens has been influenced by the mega-trends of globalization, European integration and the migrations that accompany them, the digital revolution, and rising social inequalities, and point out why this requires a “social turn” in cultural policies. The bottom-up approach that we will use will also provide us with insight into multiple, often mutually contradictory, concepts of culture and understandings of societal values of culture among various social groups in European societies, and at the same time offer the foundation for new methodologies for capturing the societal value of culture. The task that we have set for ourselves in this project is to identify the cultural and social preconditions required for the goals of the New EU Agenda for Culture to be realized. This is the overall goal of our project, aimed at supporting the values of culture vital for the preservation and improvement of the European project, by means of striving to promote identity and belonging, inclusiveness, tolerance, and social cohesion.
Environmental sustainability in immigrant households (The Leverhulme Trust grant 2021-2024 with Sherilyn MacGregor)
This research is a critical investigation of how the drive for greater urban sustainability and increasing immigration from less developed countries of the Global South intersect at the household level in an affluent city in the Global North. Recognising that household behaviour change is one of the most important targets of environmental policy in affluent countries, the project will focus on the extent to which immigrant households engage in practices that are considered environmentally significant, immigrants' experiences of such engagement, and how they understand the sustainability agenda in their adopted city.
Environmental The Effects of Culture and Religion on Food Waste Behavior in Households (Israel Science Foundation grant 2020-2023, with Ofira Ayalon and Keren Kaplan-Mintz)
Food waste prevention is a critical issue in our time. About a third of all food produced around the globe is lost along the supply chain or wasted by end-consumers every year. Private households are the main contributors to food waste in developed countries. Therefore, understanding the determinants of food provisioning in households is crucial for efforts to reduce food waste. Various studies have explored the determinants of food waste, identifying a web of interrelated socio-demographic characteristics, values, attitudes and skills as drivers of food waste. Nevertheless, current knowledge presents only a partial picture of the antecedents of household food waste, and a clear understanding of the interlinked relationship between individual-level, group-level and behavioral factors is still missing. The research aims to contribute to research on food waste by emphasizing the role of group-level factors. We will develop and empirically test a theoretical framework that specifies the causal chain, which, ultimately, leads to food waste: 1) group-level factors: culture and religion, 2) individual level factors: attitudes regarding consumer culture, sustainable lifestyle, and the environment), and 3) food related behaviors (planning, shopping, storage, preparation, consumption, and management of edible leftovers). The research will take place in Israel and will include participants from three groups that differ along axes of culture and religion: secular Jews, religious Jews, and Muslim Arabs. Data collection will consist of three components: 1) an internet survey aimed at mapping the individual factors that affect food related behaviors across groups, 2) in-depth interviews to complement the survey and deepen our understanding of those attitudes and behaviors, and their relationship to cultural contexts and religion, and 3) a food waste diary study exploring actual food waste behaviors. The knowledge produced in this project will enhance current academic research on food waste and will inform the work of non-academic stakeholders, such as central and local governments, that target the issue of food waste.
Investigating the Sustainability-Migration Nexus through Interdisciplinary Comparative Cross-National Research (University of Manchester-University of Melbourne grant 2019-2020 with Sherilyn MacGregor, Catherine Walker, and Leslie Head
The purpose of this project is to compare and consolidate research on Global South-to-Global North migration and environmental sustainability in the context of climate breakdown and global inequalities. It will explore questions about how the everyday environmental practices and knowledges of immigrants 'unsettle' dominant sustainability perspectives and how they might be positioned as a resource rather than a problem in Global North contexts. Funding is provided by a University of Manchester and University of Melbourne collaboration. The interdisciplinary nature of this topic, which sits at the intersection of human geography, environmental politics, and sociology of consumption, means that although it breaks new ground, it seems to lack resonance within fields such as migration studies and sustainability science. Our aim is to bring our respective insights together to build a persuasive intellectual case and to demonstrate potential policy impact
Environmental Habitus: The Intergenerational Transmission of Environmental Behaviors in Cross-National Comparison (BSF grant 2015-2018 with Itay Greenspan and Femida Handy)
Recent scholarly attention finds that individuals’ pro-environmental orientation is related to their parents’ pro-environmental values, attitudes, and behaviors, and that family socialization exerts a significant influence on young people’s pro-environmental orientations and behaviors. This research takes environmental behavior into the family domain, and proposes to investigate the links between environmental behaviors of three generations to measure the impact of cultural and economic contexts on intergenerational transmission of environmental behaviors. Our main theoretical heuristic is the notion of environmental habitus, arguing that a pro-environmental stance may run in the family, not necessarily because individuals follow the imperatives of the environmental movement or because they hold an environmental ideology, but because their families hold values and behavioral dispositions of frugality, modesty, or conservation that have consequences for everyday pro-environmental behavior. Furthermore, we examine environmental habitus comparatively, asking if it takes different forms in three different national contexts – Israel, the United States, and South Korea. These countries are characterized by different cultural and economic contexts, different framings of environmental issues, and different historical trajectories starting from pre-World War II and continuing up to today. We will conduct surveys in the three countries through online panels. We will interview parents and their children, and ask the parents questions about their own parents. An additional source of data will be focus groups aimed at better contextualizing and interpreting the results of the surveys. Our research will contribute to the understanding of the determinants of environmental behavior, the cross-national differences in environmental behavior, and the influence of intergenerational social reproduction on environmental issues.